Snakes

by Guy N Smith

  Jesus Christ! There were no prizes for guessing that that was a python. As thick as his own arm, with brown and green markings that would have camouflaged it almost anywhere, not moving. Maybe it was dead. No, that was too much to hope for. Even coiled it filled the container and he found himself mentally calculating the constrictor's length; it had to be eighteen, twenty feet, possibly more. Christ only knew what other horrors were down in that underground place waiting to be brought up and loaded into the van. And they would be his travelling companions for the next five or six hours! Do like the man said, forget about 'em, they're just a cargo, units in transit. No, he couldn't shut them out of his mind, that was impossible. Once he got out of here he would go like hell as soon as he hit the motorway, push the old wagon to its limit until he reached his destination. Come on, you buggers, get her loaded up and let's get the job done.

  It was hotter today than it had been yesterday, more of a sultry heat with cloud formations building up in the western sky. The driver had listened to the weather forecast on the way down—hot and dry becoming thundery towards mid-afternoon.

  He tensed, thought he caught a far-off rumble of thunder. It could have been an aircraft. Thunderstorms always made him uneasy, had done so ever since childhood. And those bleedin' snakes didn't help. He shuddered again.

  He glanced about him almost furtively. He knew this area well, and that made him uneasy too. Hold on, you're imagining things, that woman isn't likely to be wandering around a closed-down zoo. Your chances of bumping into her are virtually nil and, anyway, she wouldn't recognise you with this moustache, certainly not in passing. He shaded his eyes with a hand that was unsteady and squinted across to where the conurbation began, or ended, depending on how you looked at it. Tall, unsightly blocks of council flats; there was a rumpus going on about whether they were safe or not. He had read in the papers that they had put glass tell-tales in them to check whether the foundations were shifting or not.

  She lived in one of those. Ken Wilson used to go there, sometimes stopping overnight. No. 117. He experienced a twinge of guilt. Maybe Veronica had forgotten all about him, certainly she hadn't made much effort to trace him and she wasn't likely to after all this time. Stop worrying, she's OK, probably shacked up with another guy by now. Nevertheless, Ken Wilson did not like it when his truck driving brought him this way. There was always the awful chance that Fate might have destined him to meet up with Veronica Jones again. And now that he was living with an eighteen-year-old check-out girl from Wiggins superstore the last thing he wanted was a thirty-five-year-old spectre coming out of the past. Forget the woman and the snakes.

  'Everything's loaded up, mate.'

  Ken Wilson turned slowly, saw that the zoo workmen had even shut the back of the van up for him. All you have to do is to drive it.

  A clap of thunder had him starting visibly.

  'Looks like we're goin' to get it this time, mate,'

  'Yeah, looks like it.' Wilson walked towards the cab, opened the door, felt the heat come out at him like the forerunner of a fireball. He winced, saw the clouds of flies buzzing on the windscreen. This was what you got in flaming June, either pouring wet or too hot to move. No moderation.

  He climbed up into the cab, wound the window down; he should have done that as soon as he arrived. He felt in his pockets for cigarettes and matches—his hands were still shaking. Deliberately blowing smoke at the flies. Take that lot, you bastards. They bunched and buzzed their protest but they did not fly off.

  Finger on the starter button, he hesitated. Listening, Listening intently, anticipating slitherings and stirrings from the back. They can't get into the cab even if they escape from their containers. Can they?

  Then the thunder rolled again, terminating in a reverberating clap almost overhead. The sun was obscured by the advancing clouds which brought with them a gloom that was akin to dusk. Eerie.

  He pressed the starter and the engine turned over maybe half a dozen times before it fired. This van was a heap of crap, a 'P'-registered vehicle that had struggled to pass its MOT. Like everything else at Hadleys Transport it was on the way out. But in this day and age a job was a job and you stuck it.

  Ken Wilson let in the clutch and the van rolled forward, crunched on the gravel as he turned towards the main gates. A few rain spots smacked on the windscreen, but the expected downpour did not follow. The storm was coming from the south-west, he was travelling north. He might just keep ahead of it. He was going to do his damnedest, anyhow.

  Motorway—1 mile. A sense of freedom, no stops until he reached his destination. One last glance in the direction of those hideous council flats. Just thinking about Veronica gave him an arousement. Well, that was all she was good for; get her out of bed and she wasn't much use for anything else. No intelligence, you couldn't take her anywhere, not with that whining complaining voice. Veronica's virtues began and ended between her thighs. All the same, he hoped she was OK. Hell, he was getting a guilt complex.

  The motorway was unusually busy, an unending line of trundling trucks in the slow lane, cars cruising in the middle one. He awaited his chance and pulled out, got in behind a Mini Clubman estate that seemed packed with kids and luggage right up to the roof. A gimmicky notice above the rear number plate read: 'If you can read this you're too bloody close.' Silly buggers, what did they expect on the motorway? If you dropped back then somebody overtook you and cut in front so you couldn't make a gap no matter what you did. The roads were dry. All the same, Ken doubted if he could pull up in time if anything happened in front. Very few drivers could.

  The sun was shining again. He glanced in his mirror, saw those black and yellow clouds way behind, thought he could make out the rain sheeting down. He'd give the storm a run for its money. He experienced momentary exhilaration.

  He was watching those kids in the Clubman quarrelling and fighting when something on the seat beside him moved; something cylindrical, rolling, jerking. Oh God! The van swerved violently and he only just hauled it back into the middle lane in time. Horns blared, somebody flashed his headlights.

  Now he could see the offending object lying motionless on the floor; a screwdriver, one he had used to tighten a loose screw on" the dash earlier and had left lying on the seat. Bloody hell, for a moment he had thought it was a ...

  Don't think about those snakes. Like the man at the zoo said, you won't even have to unload them at the other end. You can report your arrival, go and get a cup of tea and by the time you get back you'll have an empty van to take home. As simple as that. You're just a driver, Ken Wilson, nothing else.

  He would have to break the return journey overnight. That was a bit of a bummer when there was a teenage girl waiting back home, willing to do anything you wanted her to. If it wasn't for these bloody tachometers they fitted in HGVs these days he would have put his foot down and gone all out to get home in one run.

  Those bloody kids in front were getting on his nerves. One had climbed over into the boot and was clinging precariously on to a pile of luggage and trying to kick hell out of the other at the same time. Why, for fuck's sake, didn't their bloody parents do something about it! Vandals and muggers in the making, that's how it all started, a lack of discipline in the home.

  The sun had gone behind the clouds and it was hotter than ever. That crap cooling system must have packed up altogether. Wilson wondered if he could get his overalls undone whilst he was driving but changed his mind when a police patrol car passed him in the fast lane. The sweat was pouring off him, his trousers were stuck to the seat.

  In his mirror he noticed headlights being used, and switched his own on. Those thunder clouds had moved at an unbelievable rate of knots. Now he heard the thunder again, resonant rolls like an angry monster roaring its wrath as it tried to run him down.

  The sudden daytime gloom had him thinking about his reptilian passengers in the back again. Man was a daytime creature, scared of the dark no matter how he tried to tell himself he wasn't. Probably the snakes were
all asleep. It was bloody cruel imprisoning them in zoos. Just done to make money. Taken out of their natural environment they slept and ate their lives away in sheer boredom. You couldn't blame them if they got nasty and turned on somebody. Man was the cruellest creature of all, there was no getting away from that. Christ, Ken thought, I'm going bloody soft.

  He found himself listening again but all he heard was engine noise. If the buggers did manage to escape they couldn't go anywhere. It was the guys the other end who would find them whilst he was somewhere safe having a bite to eat. He'd keep well clear of the van until it was empty.

  The rain came without warning, a few heavy spots followed by an instant downpour, the wipers struggling to cope. Ken Wilson cursed under his breath; the most depressing sound of all was that of the monotonous noise of windscreen wipers. Fuck it!

  Rain was bouncing up off the tarmac, being whipped into a blinding spray by the tyres of speeding traffic, obliterating from view the vehicles up ahead. The cars and lorries did not seem to be slowing any and those idiot children in the Clubman were still slinging punches at each other. One had found a tennis racket somewhere and was attempting to brain the other, battering him viciously with it.

  Ken glanced at his watch. 5.45. Night had come about four hours early; there was driving rain and a lashing gale that was bending newly planted birch saplings on the embankments almost double. Another police car passed, doing a ton for sure. One law for some, another for others.

  And then it happened! Ken did not know whether the Clubman estate had failed to see the brake lights of the Ford Transit in front or whether he had simply driven into its back, distracted by those bastards of fighting kids. Suddenly the Clubman crunched, reared like a frisky filly, momentarily upright on its rear wheels. AH in an instant before he hit it; the roof buckled, split and the glass showered out of the windows spilling those children with it.

  He saw them for a split second and braked hard, but knew he could not miss them. One was still clutching the racket, swinging it, the other's face a mass of scarlet pulp, a broken rag doll bouncing on the hard surface. Disappearing.

  Please God! He felt the front tyre crushing the infant body, saw in his mind the squashed form like those hedgehogs you saw flattened on the roads every morning. The crunching of frail bones, instant death. The other child was still airborne when he hit it, saw it flatten on the windscreen without breaking the glass, a gnat caught by a speeding vehicle. The wipers would knock it off in a second; they were buffeting it, bouncing back off, swiping it again with mechanical determination.

  Then Ken Wilson's van ploughed into the wreckage of the Clubman and the Transit, and seconds later came a shuddering jolt as he was hit from behind. He screamed aloud, gave up trying to do anything positive. The windscreen shattered and that bloody mulch disintegrated, some of it splattering the interior of the cab.

  And in that same second his own van appeared to concertina, the rear of the vehicle crushing and coming forward, his seat and harness ripped from their moorings. He was catapulted; blinding pain as the steering column shattered his chest, threw him back and then bounced him down on to the floor of the cab.

  Dazed, screaming, tasting his own blood, he lay there in the semi-darkness. He heard the squeal of tortured rubber, smelled its acrid stench, the screech of tearing metal, cries of anguish. Vehicles were still running into one another, he felt the van move again, pushed forward another few yards. Shouting, screams of pain and terror.

  Then silence, complete and utter for a few seconds. He did not try to move, just lay there in the bloody half-darkness trying to figure out exactly what had happened. A multi pile-up, they made the television news every so often but everybody forgot and they happened again. Vehicles travelling too close together in adverse weather conditions; people never learned, including himself. It can't happen to me, it's those other silly buggers. And suddenly he was one of those silly buggers.

  Don't move, just lie still and somebody will come to help soon. I'm scared to hell to look out there, I'm not badly hurt really, just cut and bruised. His senses swam, came back again. He fought down his rising panic.

  It might have been seconds or hours later—he had lost all concept of time—when he sensed rather than heard a movement in the cab. A flicker of hope, raising his head up a few inches off the ground. His eyes hurt, as if somebody was pushing a sharp instrument into them; he gasped, coughed, tasted blood. I'm here, you bloody fool. Help me. He tried to call out but the words would not come, were strangulated into a low moan.

  Something moved. His vision blurred, cleared, but only partially. An arm was reaching in through the smashed cab window, feeling inside. Jesus, don't tell me you can't see me! Ken tried to shout, mustered his vocal cords for one supreme effort and managed a wheezing gurgle, experienced a sensation as if he were drowning and tasted blood again.

  A fist, clenched. Erect. Some guy's got one helluva long arm, he thought. If they can't get to me why the fuck don't they start cutting into the cab?

  That fist was starting to open out. The driver stared, forced his agonised eyes to work with sheer willpower. It did not look right, the arm was elongated like one of those cartoons they fed the kids every afternoon on TV; no fingers, either a malformed hand or else the berk was wearing mittens. Bloody crazy, I'll go mad in a second.

  And then everything turned crazy. That hand, if it was a hand, had two tiny eyes, orbs that glinted and flickered, came forward in a sinister supple movement, a kind of mottled greenish-grey. A mouth, opening, and in those eyes Ken Wilson read hate and malevolence. And death.

  The worst moment was when realisation dawned, the jig-saw pieces slotted together through a haze of pain and fear, formed a picture which left no doubt in his terror-crazed mind.

  Jesus God Almighty, no! A cobra, the most fearsome and deadly of all snakes.

  Its face was only a foot away from his own. He tried to press himself back against the crumpled wreckage of the cab but there was nowhere to go. The creature was gloating, prolonging the fatal strike, savouring the mental anguish of Man, its captor for so long and now at its mercy.

  No, please, I don't want to hurt you. I'm only the driver.

  A trick of the half-light, or did it smile, an evil elongation of that awful mouth, another movement of the hooded head. He wanted to close his eyes and shut it out but his lids appeared to have stuck. Forced to look into those flashing pinpoints, reading death there and praying that it would be quick. I'm dying anyhow, you don't have to bother to kill me. Just leave me alone and I'll be dead before long.

  Background noises; engines running, people screaming for help outside in the Stygian blackness. A stench that was overpowering, the smell of burning rubber and heated metal, the smell of death.

  Wilson's mind had gone numb, an instinctive anaesthetic that spared him pain at the very last, transcending the limits of human endurance. He saw the cobra, knew that it was going to kill him but suddenly it did not seem so terrible after all. He would have died anyway, maybe lingered for days, perhaps ended up on a life-support machine, clinically dead but the vital organs kept alive. A pointless exercise demonstrating Man's cruelty to Man, the law forbidding euthanasia. They wouldn't let a wounded animal suffer, they'd put it down, yet it was all right for a fellow-human to undergo indescribable agonies. A twisted philosophy. He wanted to laugh because he had beaten the System, cheated them.

  The reptile struck, a sharp pain somewhere in the region of his neck, like the prick of an injection; he couldn't make up his mind whether it had bitten him or spat venom because the head was several inches away from his face. Possibly a movement too quick for the eye to follow. It didn't matter because it was all over now.

  He felt the movement of its body as it crawled across him like a thick rough hosepipe being dragged over him, and then he wondered where it had gone because he could neither see it nor hear it any longer. Probably out of the opposite window.

  A sensation as if he were burning up, as if somebody ha
d injected him with acid and his veins were corroding away, and then the numbness took over again and cut out the pain, left him with a light-headedness as though he were floating weightlessly through the atmosphere. Euphoric because it was all over and it didn't hurt.

  Outside the van the cobra dropped silently on to the wet tarmac and slithered away beneath the crumpled wreckage, its victim forgotten. The killing was over and now its instincts turned to survival in an alien world of hard man-made surfaces where the air was filled with pungent smoke and noises beyond its primitive comprehension.

  It made it to the hard shoulder, found the long grass of the adjacent embankment and began the ascent, a powerful wary creature that underwent a new experience after a lifetime of boredom in captivity.

  It tasted fear for the first time; fear that merged into anger and gave it the killing urge again.

  Chapter 3

  THE YOUNG police constable in the motorway patrol car felt his stomach churn as the message came over the radio. A weakness engulfed his limbs and he remembered how he used to be carsick as a child every time his parents took him out in the dark blue Maxi which they kept polished in the garage in readiness for a Sunday afternoon spin; an urge to open the door, lean out, leave a trail of vomit in their wake. He wanted to be back at HQ, a desk job, checking traffic reports, anywhere except out here.

  He did not speak, turned his head to one side in case Sergeant Bufton saw how white he'd gone. The sergeant had a reputation as a right bastard, both in the station and out on the cars. Just plain nasty and sarcastic, he didn't know any other way, and a young PC was fair game.

  'Ever seen a dead body, constable? I don't mean a stiff all neatly laid out in a mortuary, I mean one in a dozen different pieces that you've got to retrieve from the highway, gather 'em up in a sack and try and find out what fits where? Like a kind of jig-saw puzzle and some of them can be real teasers, but when you've been to a dozen or so such accidents you instinctively know what fits where. You'll find out before long.'