Night (15/16)

I will be adding a category called Serious Sunday, because I like resonance as a rhetorical tool.  Anything that’s a real downer will be posted on Sundays, so I can bury them Monday.   

Once again, it was me and a few other people.  One faceless woman and a crowd of extras, some children.

We were driving up on an Interstate rest area out in the cedars, probably around Mack.  There were trailer houses backed into the periphery with their windows covered in OSB shutters, framed and reinfocred.   The squat mobile home pulling tractors had their windshields covered in home made shields, locked with hasps.  The trailers and the trucks had been armored and updated and care had been given to paint them and their added armor in festive Easter colors with little flowers painted on gun placements.  This was a community that was not at home, probably out getting food or supplies.  They had a small utility trailer parked a few hundred yards from one of the entrance with a guard shack built on top of it. 

There were no birds.

Me and my group gathered around our camper and had a decision to make.  These looked like nice people.  Then, over the hills we heard their cars.  The engines were railing and the tires were squalling.  We also heard the screaming.  The screaming that burst over the hills and pulled our breath out of us.  The sound was close.  I ran back to the camper and pulled out my .300 Weatherby and my brother’s old .40 S&W pistol.  I only had the four rounds loaded into the rifle and a brick of pistol rounds.  That was why we needed these people.  We had bayonets manufactured from scrap steel we rigged to our weapons. 

I don’t know what happened to my brother.  I can guess.

I directed my people to defensible positions and prepared.  The children shut themselves in the camper with a couple sawed off shotguns, so they could make a last stand if we failed.  Most of the men and women had guns of the SKS and M-14 variety.  We sat waiting for the sound of engines and screaming, like otherworldly harpy throats being cut, to come over the ridge.  The cedars seemed to shudder at the approaching battle.   I took up position inside the guard shack.  The OSB smelled strong like glue in the heat.  I wedged my knee into the wood and my back leg against the bench to steady myself.  Every shot was important.  I found a perch for the rifle and got my sight picture arranged.  The people I brought with me were lean and strong, arms rippling copper in the sun against the green of the cedar and the red of the earth, their cotton dresses and t-shirts windbeaten and showing through in the sun.  Grass coming up through years neglected asphalt swayed in the breeze. 

The citizens of this moving town were making a good run of it, judging by the sound of their engines.  And they knew what they were doing.  You could hear vehicles attack and race away while the main body convoyed out of the area.  Birds, the only birds you see, were circling over the incoming running battle, diving and darting into the fray, black as coal.  The overall trend of the noise was approaching us, closer to the rest area.  As were the screams following close by.  The sound of claws digging into metal could be heard.  The first of the cars burst out of the treeline on the on-ramp, a dark cloud following. 

And then it all changed. 

A man was on the hood of a driverless car that was racing toward a cliff.  The man had to go over, I don’t know why.  It was for the good of all, so he must have been diseased.  The empty sky, no clouds, no airplanes, no respite from the high desert sun, was brilliant blue over the doomed sick man.  And then there was the wolf.  It jumped on the car and rode, staring at him.  The wolf was not normal.  It was articulate as it spoke and its black coat seemed to pull insanity from the world around to be distilled inside its heart engine.  The wolf spoke and its teeth went around in its mouth like a chain.  Like the mouth of a machine, the teeth flowed in a ring around his mouth while he talked.  He slashed at the man and came away dripping flesh and blood. 

His white features on his face faded away and became clear until his black fur was only a shadow.  His eyes lolled around in his shadowed skull and his invisible teeth rolled around his mouth like a chain.  I could see the rushing cedars behind him through his mouth and eyes.

He said to me, “At least I get my meat. At least I get my meat.  At least I get my meat.”

The wolf jumped away as the man, torn and bleeding and ill went over the cliff.

Then I woke up coughing.

Thinking of fleshing this out, think it has potential?