by Luka Petrov
Confusion set in the three, who now had a semblance of what was transpiring. Shadows appeared larger on the white trees. The air movements of these shadows could be felt on the vehicle as it yielded to the shadows as they passed by. “Feel that?” the Driver asked. Both Hamish and Siobhan nodded their heads, still trying to take in the wonderment of the cursed area and not to succumb to it at the same time.
The Driver came to his senses, his mind able to overcome the noise and confusion. In the distance, he saw the bluebells. He realized that those bluebells marked the end of the cursed area. Slowly, he stepped on the gas harder, propelling the vehicle at a faster velocity that it was moving at before. The vehicle accelerated, attempting to reach the finish line before the shadows decided to take them into their depths for an eternity. Time felt as if it would never end, that moment when they reached the bluebells felt like it would never come. Yet, with every passing of the tires’ rotation, they came closer to their goal.
Finally, they had reached the ley line, the preverbal finish line marked by the bluebells. The odd color of blue both a blessing and a curse, and in this one instance, was a blessing. They had made it, yet experienced an unimaginable evil of the cursed land. The part of the Earth that if given the opportunity, would devour the Earth whole. Few had been passed those line and survived. Those who survived were never the same. Only time will tell what effects that had on the three in the vehicle.
The Driver turned the car away from the cursed areas, attempting to drive away from any potential radiation while still following the crooked road signs; eventually they found themselves outside an abandoned petrol station, its rusted metal exterior standing out from the stark and vacant hills. The word ‘JET’ was written in an emblazoned blue font, the rest of the building a deranged and faded yellow. There were several petrol pumps, two discarded vehicles and a dark looking store front, its windows smashed, crushed glass littering the concrete underneath them. “Jesus Christ,” said the Driver, a phrase that made the twins wince with blasphemy, “we’ve hit the goddamn jackpot.”
“We can siphon some gas from these vehicles, they gotta have a drop or two,” muttered the Driver, turning around. “Big boy,” he added, nodding to Hamish. “You keep watch with that rifle, alright?” Hamish nodded weakly, turning to his sister; she had an expression of concern on her brow, readying her own rifle. They watched with the door open, waiting for something to happen; the Driver approached the two cars on tip-toes, both looking almost destroyed and rusted out. He had taken with him a tube and a empty plastic bottle, placing the tube into the gas tank of one of the cars. With one end of his mouth he sucked the fluid up the tube, decanting it into his bottle. “Why did someone abandon these cars?” Siobhan asked, quite rhetorically, her voice a mere whisper. Once the bottle was filled halfway from both of the cars, the Driver threw it into the boot and approached the windows.
“Can one of you come with me, check if the station’s got anything worth grabbing? Could have a safe in the back room; I’m good at cracking safes..” he mumbled, calling Siobhan out of the car. “You stay in there, buddy,” he said to Hamish with a strange sort of coldness, halting him with his hand. “Someone’s gotta protect this thing, it’s our ticket outta here.” The Driver slapped the roof of the car. Siobhan looked around at the fear in her brother’s eyes; for someone so big, he still had the greatest insecurities surrounding their detachment. Siobhan reassured him, holding onto his shoulder. Soon she and the Driver walked in silence along the cracked concrete of the floor, heading into the ominous gloom of the store. For a second she was frightened that the Driver may have been taking her inside for his own purposes, but grasping her loaded rifle put her mind at ease.
A feeling reminiscent of her experience of the Abbott crept in her mind. She would forever be changed by that instance. One thing that she was certain of was if she found herself in danger, she had her giant twin to make sure that she was safe. He would do anything to protect her. Killing was easy for him. Siobhan both admired and despised that part of her brother. He could kill with a cold precision that made her question his humanity. Yet he had the boyish sentiment that made her realize that he was a very large kid who had an undying devotion to protect his twin sister.
That was the one thing that she could think of that they were different. Siobhan had guilt and shame for whenever she killed. The incident with the mutants made her feel sorry for them. Both her and Hamish killed those mutants who attacked them, and those mutants had every intention of killing them. Yet, she felt bad that they had to die, and they got to live. This guilty conscience was not going to bode well for her during this time of post-apocalyptic survival. She would have to learn how to have a thicker skin and to desensitize herself to killing.
It didn’t take long for them to become frightened, the bell of the door jingling upon entry. Siobhan pointed her rifle, the Driver taking out his gun from his jacket pocket; but silence rang out, the room seemingly devoid of life. The Driver flicked on an LED torch, shining it around the empty building; the insides had been long ago ransacked, most its contents either destroyed or missing. As they stepped inside, Siobhan flashed a look through the broken window, looking out at Hamish in the car; he now laid down in the backseat, the rifle pointed upward in anticipation of an enemy. The Driver walked behind the counter of the shop, finding a small safe still intact below the desk. “Hohoho, my suspicions are confirmed,” his voice excitedly whispered, bending down to place his ear to the metal.
Siobhan watched him for a moment, his petrol-covered fingers turning at the numbers of the safe’s combination lock. Tiring of the sight of this activity, she turned toward the back of the store, walking toward the open door of the store room. “Don’t go too far now,” he said, flashing her a wink. Siobhan gave him back a blank sort of stare, her rifle held firmly in her hands. She trusted him just enough to get them to town. Walking into the dark of the store room, she saw that the roof had collapsed inward, daylight flooding into the many shelves. With the light glimmering onto the floor, she reached down and prized a can of baked beans from under a metal desk. Taking one step forward, she looked up to see the metal of the walls had rippled and melted, as if the store room had been subjected to intense heat. Then her eyes drifted up to the ceiling, her eyes widening to the sight before her. She saw the bodies of several men, dressed in uniforms and now in a process of mummification, fused within the metal of the walls. It looked as if the room itself had consumed them, assimilating their bodies into the hot metal of the walls. Their contorted, screaming faces stared back at her, their clothes covered in the fur of white fungus.
Siobhan ran from the room at some speed, panting and sweating; she could not hear the sound, but she felt the presence of something within the building, the hairs on her arms standing on end. “We HAVE to leave,” she shouted, darting toward the door. “Hold your horses,” the Driver replied, finally prizing open the safe. He reached within the dark box, pulling out huge wads of pound notes. With a look of depression, he let it slip through his fingers, turning and leaving toward the door. Siobhan ran into the car first, clutching her brother into her arms. She spoke to no one of what she saw, the car’s engine churning into life. Soon they were back on the road, their vehicle drifting toward the green horizon.
Siobhan began to believe the they had met the Driver on divine intervention. She was convinced that he was an angel sent from the Heavens to help both her and her brother. He was cunning and shrewd. He also eased the burden of their journey and made it fun. It was nice speaking with someone other than her twin. Hamish only enjoyed spending time with his sister and enjoyed the car ride. As for the Driver, he was not fond of him, but he did not distrust him either. She rocked back and forth in her seat once again and whispered to herself, “Matthew 13:39-43, ‘and the enemy who sowed them is the devil, and the harvest is the end of the age; and the reapers are angels. So just as the tares are gathered up and burned with fire, so shall it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man wi
ll send forth His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all stumbling blocks, and those who commit lawlessness, and will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then THE the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father He who has ears, let him hear’.” This verse brought solace to Siobhan and the Earth started to make sense.
Before Siobhan or Hamish could realize what was occurring, the car screeched to a halt in front of a silhouette of a horse standing straight in the middle of the road. On closer inspection, half of its face had been rotted away by poisonous rain or perhaps through cannibalism of some kind. It stared into the eyes of Hamish, and the young man was struck by the horror of its hollow eye socket. If the Driver had waited a moment longer, the entire vehicle may have crashed into the animal. So, there they sat, all stationary and panicked, while the Driver honked the horn. He was covered in sweat, but then again, he always was. “Get OUT of the ROAD!” he yelled, honking away at the wheel. The decaying horse simply stared at him, half blind, snorting loudly through its nostrils. It was only then that they noticed the dark length of rope, tethered tightly to the animal’s neck, forcing it into place. The horse had been placed there, it seemed, on purpose.
9. The Seven Plagues
Siobhan pulled the lever on her door, swinging it open into the foggy air outside. Her brother motioned to join her, but she pushed him back inside with a smile, a small play fight emerging between them. “Let me go,” she said, “I’ll just be a minute.” Hamish glared at her through his funny, bulbous eyes, pounding at the leather of the seats. “‘Amish! Just a moment,” she reiterated, walking out into the clouds of fog. It was hard for him to part with her after so many years of longing. From the car, they watched as she moved over to the animal and untied the tether from its neck. Hamish observed her as one might a goddess, her fragile white body moving elegantly through the ash-colored air. As she moved the loop of rope from the horse’s long, veiny bones, she turned the material toward its head, pushing it out from the snare. The horse grunted in approval, bowing its head.
While the animal jittered and trotted about, another sound came from the woods, a sound that echoed all around them. It was the sound of something emerging slowly, something coming out towards the vehicle. Before they knew it, they were surrounded by figures, people arriving from the mist itself. For a second Hamish, caught one from his eye, thinking he had descended into the terrors of fable. But then one grasped open his car door, opening it wide. Hamish saw him with his own eyes, a man with a face that looked mutated, sculptural. With a graven brow of flesh and eyes at either side of his head, he looked like a demon from the books the monks showed him. The mutant piled into the car at some speed, not realizing that the albino held a weapon. But soon the hollow tube of a gun was pressed right up against the mutant’s forehead.
The misfortune of these highwaymen began with a single blast and evaporation of one man’s life in a sea spray of blood. It gushed and gushed, the blast of Hamish’s gun removing half of his contorted face. The mutant still grasped for something, for anything, as the life faded from his remaining eye. The gunshot was more than the road men had expected, much more than they bargained for. In their minds, it was a clean job, a theft of a functional vehicle. But all had not gone to plan. Siobhan herself swung the rifle around from her back, where it was once concealed, to her waist. She wasn’t a great shot, but she hit one, nonetheless. A raider clad in a motorcycle helmet ran desperately toward the Driver with a chain; her bullet hit him square in the gut, blood exploding from the hole in his abdomen. Now, of a group of six, two were dead.
Siobhan darted toward the car, Hamish swinging open the door to the passenger seat. She leaped inside, half her body lying on the seat, Hamish grasped at her arms, pulling her, but another raider clung gloved hands around her other half, his face covered in hair and pus-filled sores. Siobhan was being tugged from both sides, screaming from fright. Meanwhile, from both sides of the Driver’s seat came two other raiders, smashing at the windows with sledgehammers.
The Driver scrambled for the sawn-off shotgun beneath the seat, a weapon he had only used a few times in his stay on the islands; he had loaded it with shells in case of the need for a sudden escape from mortality. The edge of the sledgehammer smashed through the glass of the Driver’s window, the entire end of it cracking the glass in two. Suddenly, there was nothing separating the two. The raider, now visible, was a screaming, balding man with a giant and toothless mouth, and large scars of mutilation covering his small and shrunken head. The Driver pulled back the safety of his gun and fired at the man outside his window. The first blast seemed to miss him directly, but the buckshot appeared to puncture the mutant’s body, as blood began pouring out from various wounds. He screamed a terrible, piercing scream.
Then another raider from the left-hand side, a woman with a rusted gas mask and a body covered in dog furs, smashed through the front window with a club covered in nails. The glass-covered everyone in the interior, scraping at their skin as they moved. Hamish managed to pull his sister inside with some force, yanking her into the glass-covered seating. The haired mutant leaped inside with them, a rusted knife in his hand. With a few slices, he managed to jab at Siobhan, cutting at her back like one would a piece of meat. It took seconds for Hamish to lean over in a rage, pulling the hairy face of the man toward him with his fingers around his neck. Hamish choked the life out of him, his other hand pulling his eyes out with each finger. The sound of yelling and shouting filled the vehicle as the man’s knife dropped to the floor.
Another gunshot spelled the end for the attacking small-headed scavenger, the round of buckshot filling his chest with smoke and lead. The woman with the club, however, was still very much alive. She swung that club straight toward the Driver, the nails of her weapon prying his shotgun from his fingers. Rusted nails caught his cheek, ripping out a piece of flesh. Before he could react, Hamish had blasted the masked woman out of the smashed windscreen, her bloodied corpse falling across the bonnet of the car. “Please, drive us,” whimpered Siobhan, who watched more dark figures approaching the car. Slamming the doors shut, they drove away from the raiders at full speed. Another, an old man with some kind of pipe, was caught in the vehicle’s path and trod underneath the wheels. They drove in panicked silence for some time, everyone deeply exhaling and panting. Finally, they began to laugh, excited by the prospect of survival.
“We did it, baby!” screamed the Driver, honking the horn in excitement. They were left with bruises, bleeding wounds, and hearts full of adrenaline and fear, but by some miracle they were alive. Siobhan’s wounds were minimal, but the cuts were deep. They would need to find medical assistance. Hamish knew that such cuts could be poisoned, that they would require sterilization. “Here, Hamish,” gestured the Driver, passing him a flask of bathtub liquor, “use this. It’ll clean it. Not too much now!”
Hamish did as instructed, pouring the contents of the small bottle onto the jagged cuts. Siobhan winced in pain but held her breath, knowing full well that her brother had saved her life. They continued to drive past abandoned barn houses, petrol stations, and eerie looking shacks. Each place looked like its own nightmare, its own series of doorways and possibilities leading toward death.
As they once again drove through the endless landscape, Siobhan plucked up the courage to discuss the forbidden places, to ask the Driver about his theories. Around them the hills thundered on, the sky now deep and cloudy green with the onset of evening. “What is your belief,” she began, placing a quivering hand on the top of the Driver’s seat, “on the existence of the devil? Of the places we cannot step—” she muttered, gulping in acknowledgment of her innocence. The older Driver grazed his fingers over the wound on his cheek, thinking to himself. “You mean places affected by the flares? Well...” he mumbled, “I think the stories of those places are fiction. Poppycock! Symptoms of radiation produce unusual effects, hallucinations. They aren’t haunte
d, they’re toxic,” he began, driving as if not a thing was wrong in the world. “All we gotta do is stay away, and maybe, baby, we can live.”
Far off in the distance, they could see structures, dim lights reflecting from buildings and boats. Hamish had somehow fallen asleep and was snoozing with his head up against the glass. He had drifted away while holding a piece of his cloak against her wound, the material soaking up the blood. Tears began to brim in his sister’s eyes as she realized there was a whole town, a place, with a community and people. A place with street lights, with hope and food and clean water. It was the place she had dreamt of for so long, perhaps a place where they could find their purpose. “I only came here before the Nine Years of Lights,” the Driver whispered, his breath taken away by the sight. “It’s the first real place I’ve seen in the longest time.”
Siobhan leaned over to talk to him, her voice delicate like woven silk. “It is so exquisite,” she said, seeing the oil lamps in the distance reflected on the water of the harbor. The Driver had the feeling of taking two ethereal beings into the world of the living, of transporting young children to a paradise of experience. Their vehicle made a series of turnings down through the landscape, wrecks of cars dotted about the tall and endless grass. Soon they saw hand-painted road signs glowing in the green mist of the darkened sky, directing them toward a settlement. And then as they grew closer, they saw that many of the signs held skulls—both animal and human. “NO THEEVES,” read one in darkened spray paint “NO MUDDERERS,” said another, cobbled together haphazardly. Siobhan held onto her sleeping brother, praying in her mind to nobody in particular.
