Then he found her. She lay curled up at the edge of the garden, her pale skin reflecting the flickering flames. At first, because of the blood covering her face, chest and arms, he thought she must be dead. Then she took a breath. She had a bloody hole in her shoulder where something had obviously stabbed her, but after a quick check that was the only wound he could find. Scooping Hudson up in his arms, Craig carried her through the garden towards his parked car.
“Am I alive, what happened?” Hudson looked up at Craig with tired eyes.
“You’re alive, babe. Some creature ripped those villagers apart and we need to get out of these woods before it comes back.” Craig glanced around nervously as he spoke.
“Okay! Whatever you think’s best.” Hudson closed her eyes with a soft smile, sure in the knowledge her secret was safe, at least for another month.
Ash Hartwell has had over fifty short stories published in anthologies from, JEA, Stitched Smile Publications, Nocturnicorn Books, and Open Casket Press, to name a few. JEA published his collection of shorts, Zombies, Vamps and Fiends in 2015 and his debut novel, Tip Of The Iceberg, is out mid-2017.
He was born, lives in Northamptonshire and is planning not to die for a while.
The fist came from nowhere; a wet slap to the side of the head which rattled his brain and bandied his legs. It was all he could do to remain on his feet as a trillion white dots danced around in the space between his eyes and eyelids. He was suddenly aware of shouts and screams, panicked interpolations laden with expletives, and though he recognised at least one of the voices—it sounded thick and vague, as if its speaker were sitting at the bottom of an ocean—there were several which he did not.
Blinking the white dots away, Michael staggered back, his hip crashing into what he could only infer to be the pool table upon which he had recently been a player. The pub—The Mermaid’s something or other—swiftly returned to him in all its kitschy grandeur. His aggressor, a heavy-set thug with shorn head, had by now snatched up the nearest pool cue and was attempting to shake off two gentlemen, who were doing everything within their power to prevent the thug from striking again.
Michael spat a glob of blood onto the sticky pub carpet and was about to speak when—
“There was no need for that, mate.” It was Alan, Michael’s best friend, stepping forward to confront the thug, who was still trying to sidestep the duo blocking his path, although no longer with any real determination. “It’s just a game of pool.”
The pub seemed to return to normal, then. Punters ordered drinks from the bar, and the fruit-machine standing in the corner resumed its incessant chirruping and epilepsy-inducing flashing. The fight—if it could even be considered as such, what with its brevity and remarkable one-sidedness—was over before it had begun.
“I think we should leave, Michael.” A hand wrapped around his upper arm, gently tugged him away from the pool table. It was Carrie, and her voice was barely a whisper, a staccato exhalation drenched with fear.
All at once a surge of defiance coursed through Michael. Why should they leave? Because some asshole was a bad loser? It didn’t sit well with him. And besides, he had only just got the drinks in; the froth had yet to dissipate on his and Alan’s pints. Carrie and Lisa’s drinks—some ungodly sweet cocktail the colour of pissed-on sludge—sat untouched on the table to his right.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Michael said. His jaw clicked as he spoke, and for a moment he wondered if the damage done—ostensibly superficial—would require further attention.
He turned, walked across to his beer, picked it up and took a long, solid slug. He watched as the two Samaritans led the thug across to the other side of the pub and sat him down at a table.
“Nice moves, there,” Alan sighed. He picked up his own glass and took a mouthful. “On the bright side, you stayed on your feet. That was a helluva punch. Fuck, I didn’t even see it coming until it was too late.”
Satisfied that there would be no further skirmishes—the thug was laughing with the two men, now, seemingly over the altercation—Michael settled onto the leather bench at the back of their table. “Fucker almost punched me into the future,” he said, not without humour. He was secretly glad of the two men who had bravely stepped in to block off the thug, for it was a fight Michael would not have stood much chance of winning.
Easing in beside him, Carrie said, “The guy was an asshole. I hate people like that. Out for a fight, that’s all. Makes me sick.” She gently squeezed his leg and smiled. Michael adored that smile and the way it dimpled her cheeks. “Let’s finish our drinks and get out of here, yeah?”
Michael turned to Alan, who was nodding in agreement. Lisa beside him said, through a heavy yawn, “I’ve got an early start in the morning, anyway,” as if that should be the deciding factor. The truth of the matter was, as a ward nurse Lisa always had an early start. She was also always exhausted. Michael didn’t know how Alan put up with it. Her constant fatigue and ridiculous hours must have made it almost impossible to maintain any sort of sex life.
Thankfully, Carrie was just a barista.
“We’re not leaving because of that prick,” Michael said, the last syllable slightly louder than the ones before it, for he was still chagrined at the sheer gall of the thug and wanted him to know it. The thug, however, was too busy rolling a cigarette and shouting unintelligibly at the big-screen and the myriad interchangeable rugby players projected upon it to notice.
“It’s not because of him,” Alan said. “Lisa’s got an early start, and I’m not feeling it tonight. You’ve already hit your limit” —he motioned to the half-empty pint sitting on the table in front of Michael— “and this place is about to get rowdy as hell. I didn’t even know there was a game on tonight.”
“Nor me,” Michael said. “Fucking rugby.” If it were up to him, all rugby fans—thugs and criminals to a man—would be taken outside and shot. It was probably a good job it was not up to him.
Beneath the table, Carrie’s hand ran up along the outside of his thigh before tracking inwards, fingers gently trailing over his flies. “An early night wouldn’t hurt us either,” she said. “That is, if you’re not too tired after your tussle with Goliath over there.”
“Not much of a tussle,” Michael said, somewhat despondently.
“You were the bigger man,” she said, and now she was applying pressure to his groin, pressing gently down, seeking out his burgeoning erection. Into his ear, she whispered, “I think you deserve a reward.”
“I think I need a piss before we leave,” Michael said.
The cubicle was filthy, its toilet overflowing with soiled paper and cigarette butts. Michael dropped the seat down so he didn’t have to look at it, lest the pint he had just finished make a sudden and unwanted reappearance.
He took the small bundle of coke from his jacket pocket and unwrapped it, being careful not to lose any of the powder it contained to the piss- and shit-stained cubicle floor. Using the cistern at the back of the toilet, he prepared a trio of lines before snuffling them up through a rolled twenty.
Now he was ready to leave The Mermaid’s something or other, and to hell with the thuggish prick and his stupid game of rugby.
For an August night the weather was atrocious. Rain peppered the windscreen faster than the wipers could sweep it aside. Michael could just about make out the lights of the car in front through the torrent. It was gloomy, but not yet full dark.
In the passenger seat Carrie toyed with her phone. Michael guessed she’d stumbled upon yet another addictive puzzle game of some description. He would lose her to it in those moments of silence, those breaks in conversation and activity, for several weeks or until she mastered it to the point it became monotonous, whichever came first.
He didn’t mind. Those asinine cryptic apps made her happy; she often smiled like a child as she played them, and Michael would watch her as she played, would find himself smiling along as intense concentration played about her features and her tongue, upon
occasion, popped out of the side of her mouth.
“Slow down.”
It was Alan from the seat directly behind his own. His words were accompanied by a gentle kick halfway down the seat.
Michael glanced down at the speedometer: 52 m.p.h. “I’m hardly going fast,” he said. “Just because you’re used to riding shotgun with your mom.”
“With your mom,” Alan replied, puerilely. “And she loves it.”
Michael couldn’t help but laugh. Perhaps it was the three lines of coke he’d just snorted; under normal circumstances, a ‘your mom’ joke would barely scratch his funny-bone.
“Did you just say that you sleep with Michael’s mom?” Lisa asked Alan from the back seat. It was banter, the kind of thing they all partook in when the mood was right.
“Only on nights I’m not with you,” Alan said.
“Well that’s never, then,” Lisa said.
“And only on the nights Michael’s not sleeping with her.”
“A bit much, Al,” Carrie said, suddenly emerging from her game. Perhaps, Michael thought, it was a change between levels. When she returned to the game a few seconds later, he knew that’s what it had been.
Michael arrived on the A454 in good time. Traffic was surprisingly light, which was a good thing. He wanted to get home while Carrie was still in the mood so that they might finish what she started back at the pub. But first there would be a quick stop in Bridgnorth to unload Alan and Lisa. Lisa who didn’t really like Carrie (the feeling was mutual) but tolerated her for the sake of Alan the same way Carrie put up with Lisa. It never ceased to amaze Michael how good they both were at concealing their unwarranted disinclination for one another in order to protect the sanctity of the group.
If the shoe were on the other foot, Michael knew he would not be able to make such an effort.
“How many times?” Alan suddenly said. “Slow down, dude. It’s slick as all hell out there. If you have to brake—”
“Do you want to drive?” Michael said. “Chill the fuck out, mate. Let those of us with a license get on with it, yeah?”
It was a cheap shot—Alan had failed his test on three occasions, and was currently awaiting a date for his fourth attempt—but there was nothing Michael hated more than backseat drivers.
“You should probably slow down,” Carrie said nonchalantly and without looking up from her phone.
“Don’t you start,” said Michael, a tension mounting inside of him. The road ahead was now clear. A little rain wasn’t going to slow him down, and neither was the complaints of his passengers. He just wanted to get rid of Alan and Lisa now. Miserable pair of fuckers.
He pressed gently down on the accelerator.
“Oh, well, that’s smart,” Alan said, for he must have felt the car’s steady quickening. “You know what? I hope the police pull us—”
“There’s no police out here,” Michael said. “They use this stretch for races.” He didn’t know if that were true; he simply wanted to unnerve Alan. “No cameras either,” he went on. “In fact, I’d go so far as to say this is probably the least patrolled stretch of carriageway in the midlands.”
65 m.p.h.
71 m.p.h.
77 m.p.h.
“Michael,” Carrie said, and when he turned to face her he saw that she was no longer interested in her game; she looked angry. “Knock it off.”
“Knock what off?” Michael hammered at the steering wheel with open palms. It hadn’t occurred to him until now, but he was still frustrated about what had happened back at The Mermaid’s something or other. Coupled with three lines of coke off the back of a grimy toilet, he was a ball of raging fury.
And judging by the way his girlfriend was looking at him, an idiot to boot.
“You’re being a dickhead,” Carrie said. “Slow down—”
“Can you believe that fucking asshole back there?” Michael said through gritted teeth. His head snapped to the side as he relived the heavy punch the thug had connected with. He quickly snapped it back across to the road. “I should have dropped that fucker!” He knew it was the drugs speaking, but in that moment he felt as if he could take on anyone. He wanted to turn the car around, head back to the pub and lay into that sonofabitch. Keep hitting him until nothing remained but a pile of meaty flesh and grey matter. He wanted to do that before the coke wore off and he went back to being boring old Michael Sullivan, the pussy who lets people hit him and get away with it, the faggot who allows people to tell him how to drive his own car.
“Just calm down!” Carrie was frantic now, and as she lunged forward, her phone slipped down into the foot-well.
But Michael couldn’t calm down. He just wanted to hurt something, to take his anger out on something other than the steering-wheel.
The car veered to the right; the rapid thump-thump-thump of painted lines passing beneath the tyres sounded like the ceremonial drumming of some ancient tribe. Carrie screamed, begged Michael to straighten up and reaching for the wheel herself. Her seatbelt snatched her back into place, just shy of the wheel.
“I’m going back there!” Michael was howling now, a madman without a full moon for inspiration. He grabbed the wheel with both hands and pulled it hard to the right, his intention to squeal across into the adjacent lane and continue back in the direction from which they had just travelled. And it might have worked out that way if he’d first slowed down. As it was, the car made it just across the median strip before its wheels locked up.
At 75 m.p.h., the car flipped once, twice, a third time; a cacophony of twisting steel and shattering glass. For Michael, everything happened in slow-motion. He watched as Carrie thumped forward, momentarily ejected from her seat, her tiny frame snapping like so many broken twigs, her nose exploding like a crimson bomb upon the glove compartment. Then she was pulled back into the seat as thin slivers of glass shredded her face and neck to ribbons. As his own face planted squarely into the airbag where a moment ago there had been a steering-wheel—and as the car completed its second flip—something passed over his shoulder and slammed into the already-decimated windscreen.
A body.
Somebody.
And over they went once more. By now Michael cursed the cocaine he’d snorted, for it was surely that which stretched this horrific scene out into perpetuity. He felt no pain, and no matter how much he prayed for unconsciousness it did not come.
He was forced to watch as the body of his girlfriend, the bodies of his friends, were bent and broken by invisible hands.
Then there was greenery in the car, whipping at Michael’s face, as the car completed its fourth and final flip. He knew this road well, tried to picture the embankment they were now sliding down as the unmistakeable smell of petrol filled up the crumpled shell of his vehicle and lulled him toward obscurity.
Cars explode, he thought. Cars explode when they flip over and this one’s no different.
But the car did not explode.
What happened next was so much worse.
Michael Sullivan survived.
This is important, Michael told himself as he locked his front door, walked down the path and climbed into his ’06-plate Corsa. It was a cold night, one year to the day of the terrible accident in which his girlfriend, his friend, and his friend’s girlfriend had foolishly entrusted him with their lives. The maudlin anniversary was not what made this night so important, for he knew he could drive that stretch any night of the year and still not obtain the closure he so desired. What made it important was the strange pull he had been feeling these past few days, an almost inexorable summoning.
He had dreamed, three nights prior, of Carrie, wandering along the thin strip of kerbing at the side of the A454, her clothes bloodied and torn, her face all but obliterated. Slivers of glass protruded from her pale white flesh. And yet despite her obvious trauma, she skipped incongruously along, as if this were the happiest she had been in her life. The dream had not finished there, however, for a mile or so along the road Carrie had met up with Al
an and Lisa. Both were bloody, broken caricatures of their former selves, slumped against a hedge, almost like marionettes whose strings had been cut. And yet they, too, were apparently happy; their faces contorted with smiles far too wide for their heads.
Michael had wakened with a start, a thin sheet of sweat coating his entire body. What a strange and terrible dream, he had thought, and yet he could not ignore it. And that had proven to be the case in the three days that followed, when everything seemed to remind him of Carrie, of that night a year ago. Just yesterday, during a rare venture out, he had found himself face to face with a man he had not seen in twelve months.
The rugby thug.
Here he was at the newsagents purchasing a paper and tobacco, unaware that the man standing in the queue behind—heart racing, head pounding, stomach churning—had once bettered him at pool and subsequently met with his giant, tattooed fist. A year had passed in which Michael had not seen this man, but now, of course, here he was.
It meant something.
Michael pulled away from the kerb, drove slowly and carefully between the cars parked either side of his street, and turned right.
It was raining, as it had been on the night of the accident—
Accident?
You murdered them the moment you snorted those lines in that filthy cubicle!
“That’s not true!” Michael screamed. “It could have happened to anyone!”
Anyone stupid enough to use coke, you selfish bastard!
“Shut up!” He slapped at the side of his head, hoping the accusatory voice—an ungodly amalgamation of Carrie, Alan, and Lisa, for they were now Legion, it seemed—ceased its cruel hecklings. They came to him every now and then, as if to remind him of his past transgressions.
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