by Ray Cluley
A car was coming.
Rita stood and her knees popped. She crouched, and stood again; crouched and stood. Stretching like an athlete warming up.
The car was coming fast, relying on the lateness of the hour and the seclusion of the route to ensure a lack of oncoming vehicles. They clearly didn’t know how dangerous this spot could be, knew nothing of its reputation. The full beam of its headlights cast shadows across the graves and soon it would be at the bend, slowing to turn and speeding again afterwards. Rita could hear music from its open window, something loud and heavy and repetitive, and she wondered if the driver was returning from a pub or party. One in six road deaths were the result of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Alcohol slowed reaction speeds and removed the inhibitions that road safety depended on.
The car was here. It had turned. It was accelerating.
Rita stepped out into its path. She muttered her prayer standing still in the centre of the road, closing her eyes as the driver widened his.
She heard the loose stones of the rough road crunch under locked wheels and several struck her, but the car did not. She felt it pass, felt the rush of its motion-made wind, and then it was thumping over grass and tearing through hedge before slamming directly into one of the many trees lining the road. Rita opened her eyes with the gunshot report of its impact, saw the bonnet V around ancient oak and the windscreen shatter, heard the brief blast of horn as head met steering wheel before whip-lashing back against the seat.
Rita pulled her hood down from her face as she ran to the vehicle. She knew how frightening she looked, all facial scars and only sporadic hair. She peered in at the driver. A young man with a face of blood instead of features. His hand on the dashboard twitched in final spasms. Behind him, lying sprawled across the back seat, a young woman groaned but was still. Her eyes fluttered as if in a deep sleep.
Rita reached in and took the fluffy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror then ran away into the night. If the young woman passenger saw any of it she would only remember a monster.
S
Carina had only ever seen one car accident and it was the one she’d been in. Rita, the name she’d given herself afterwards, had seen fifteen more. There had been nothing accidental about any of them.
She tucked the rabbit into a blanket on the front seat beside her so she could get to it quickly. She had something she’d fashioned from a board and some nails stuffed inside. She’d wanted to use a four-pronged shape she’d made of twisted metal, something that would sit like a sharp pyramid inside the chest cavity, but in trying to insert it she’d discovered it was too large. The fur stretched around it unnaturally. So in the end she’d hammered a few four inch nails into a piece of wood half an inch thick and dressed it with rabbit skin. The nails were clustered enough that no single tip pressed the flesh into a tell-tale point. What she didn’t want was for a do-gooder motorist to remove the corpse from the road and discover her contraption propped inside. Rita assumed she’d be all right; nobody would handle the animal with their hands anyway.
She dressed smart, as if going to work, in case she was stopped or caught or questioned or something and could look professional, trustworthy. She hadn’t worked since the accident, she didn’t need to, but she still had the clothes. She felt good this morning. Rested. Successful and with purpose, just as the clothes suggested.
“Come on, Flopsy. Let’s hit the road.”
Stupid expression. You didn’t hit the road; the road hit you.
The engine started straight away; she kept the new Golf in good repair. She pulled out of the garage and headed for one of the main roads leading to the city. She’d missed rush hour, that ironically named period when cars barely moved, taking people to jobs that offered the same stunted progress. This was the real rush hour, now. The time when most were at work already except for those running late; the ones actually able to rush. The ones who wouldn’t swerve for roadkill.
She drove a familiar stretch between roundabouts until the road was clear enough, then quickly deposited the nail board bunny near the middle of the road. There was enough green either side that it was a feasible spot for a rabbit, and she was far enough away from the main stretch to avoid CCTV. She got back in her car and drove it to somewhere she could park. Then she walked to a flyover bridge that offered a good view and waited.
S
The first time Rita deliberately caused a collision was three months after Motorway Day, one week after her release from hospital. She had taken her new name by then. Carina, wife and mother, no longer existed.
I will only exist in road traffic accidents, in RTAs. The road and I and traffic accidents. I am Rita.
It was perfect. She should have seen it sooner. But then her god worked in the same mysterious ways as everybody else’s. Why would it let her survive and not others if not to tell her something, show her something? This is how I feed, it said. This is how I remind you I exist. Respect me. Fear me. Strap your belt across your chest, let bags of air cushion you with complacence, and I will still take what is owed. I shove engine blocks through steel and plastic to smash your husband’s knees, folding him foetal, tearing his groin to ribboned ruins. I make children fly through broken glass to fall hard and fast, scraped bare, right down to bone. I shatter rear windscreens, shower children with cubes of glass, and while one of yours fumbles with the buckle in her lap I give her a motorcycle to tear the hair from her scalp in its spinning wheel, sear her face with hot engine metal. I ignite fuel with a whoomph! that is my war cry and you’ll hear it in every dream with your daughter’s scream as flesh roasts and drops from blackened bones, however briefly the fire burns. And you, held in place by belt and bag, will hear it all, smell it all, and know me.
And should you dare forget, I have marked you.
S
By the time Rita was in position, someone had already driven over the rabbit. The head was a flat smear and the impact had tossed the body onto its back. It wouldn’t matter, there were nails both sides of the board. However, it was now more or less over the white lines, so unless someone was overtaking . . .
Rita waited.
In the early days after Motorway Day, Rita had considered dropping bricks from a spot like this. She’d wait for a car loaded with people and let it fall. The windscreen would smash and someone might be killed, but better would be a dramatic swerve into oncoming traffic, or a panicked spin, a skidded circle to face the rushing cars coming up behind. There’d be the squeal of tire rubber and cars would hit cars with the dull thump and crunch of metal, the soft smash of windscreen glass and the sound it made as it shushed and fell in chunks and scattered across the tarmac and maybe a car would even roll over and—
A slow Rover, 400 series, was approaching. An elderly man was driving. Rita could see him because of how low he sat in the seat, peering over the dashboard like Mr. Magoo. There was no danger of him hitting the bunny board, and he’d be a poor offering anyway, but behind, impatiently swerving out to check for oncoming, waiting to overtake, was someone in a Nissan Micra. Good enough car, sturdy, but just as vulnerable as any other at its wheels. Rita watched it coming, watched it coming, saw it swoop out into the other lane and pass under her. She turned to the other railing of the bridge and watched as the left back tire pulverized the roadkill into wet chunks and blew out simultaneously. The board pinned the flesh to the wheel for a moment then was tossed somewhere behind, car fishtailing left and right with a screech and whumpwhumpwhump of tattered rubber. Then a crunch as it struck another car, and the blast of a horn from somewhere Rita couldn’t see because she’d closed her eyes. Her lips moved in muttered prayers as the wind blew her hair around her face.
She saw the new breeze as an acceptance of her gift, and the eventual cries from below—
“Somebody call an ambulance!”
“Hello? Can you hear me in there? Are you all r
ight?”
“Call an ambulance!”
—confirmed it for her.
She ran for the stairs down, exhilarated and joyous.
S
When Rita had been Carina with a husband and two children, she had been an area manager for a mobile phone company. She would travel the county visiting the various stores where staff half her age sold the company product to customers half of theirs. She travelled a lot, in a company car. It was an Alfa Romeo, not the safest, not the worst, and it was red, which was statistically considered the most dangerous colour a car could be, after black, but looked good. The colour didn’t have a bearing on what happened.
It happened on the motorway. Over 2000 people were killed on major roads every year. Many of the accidents occurring on motorways were due to changing lanes, with exits and entrances prime hotspots. None of that mattered in Rita’s case.
She’d been on the phone while driving. In a recent survey, over 20% of drivers admitted to using their mobile phone while driving, and research showed it caused a 50% slower reaction time to any hazards on the road. It was impossible to establish how many accidents were caused by the use of mobile phones while in control of a vehicle, “control” being a laughable word in such context, due to a lack of available data. But that didn’t matter, either, because Rita had been using a hands-free set, no more dangerous than singing along to your radio. In fact, she heard the sound of the collision up ahead before her husband did. He had been turned around in his seat talking to the children, trying to untwist Sian’s seatbelt when the Vauxhall Astra three cars ahead turned into a sideways slide, and the Ford Fiesta two ahead flashed its brake lights and hit it and rose up onto its bonnet, and the car immediately in front of her, a Citroen Xantia, rear-ended it at the better part of fifty miles an hour.
Rita only had time to scream before their own car joined the pile up.
She dreamt it every night with only minor changes. She always woke at the same point, with the same hot stink in her nose and a scream upon her lips. She would wake and clutch damp sheets to herself and pat the left side of the bed, the passenger side, for Todd, but he was never there. Not any more.
S
The Nissan was creased sharply in on one side, one back tire flat and the other wheel folded under the vehicle entirely where the front of the old man’s Rover was still buried. He was trapped inside, looking around and opening his mouth again and again as if surprised over and over at his situation. People were talking to him all at once, which probably didn’t help, but no one could get him out yet.
The woman in the front car was clearly dead. A starburst of blood lined the driver’s window, cracked where her head had struck, and her blonde hair was thick with it. You only knew she was blonde from the other half of her head, the half with the proper round shape.
A third car had hit the back of the old man, probably ploughing him into where he now sat. The bonnet was concertinaed and the front wing panel, the one Rita could see, had tried to copy the pattern. Steam hissed from beneath. The occupants had emerged unharmed, though a man shook violently at the verge as a woman comforted him.
“I’ve phoned an ambulance,” Rita lied, in case anyone still hadn’t done so.
One of the men roadside turned and nodded at her and then saw her face, her hair. Her hood had come down. Startled, he staggered back.
“Oh shit,” said someone at the Rover. “Oh shit, oh shit.”
The old man was clutching his left arm and his gaping mouth stayed open now, this time in pain. Sirens sounded in the distance but they’d be too late.
Rita wondered if a heart attack would count, if she would be credited for that. If not, she hoped one blonde woman in her early twenties would be a good enough follow up to last night’s man at the churchyard.
She went back to her own car before the sirens could get much closer and before the road was closed. On the way she stopped to pick up a broken wing mirror from the Nissan. She tucked it inside her coat and hurried home.
S
Sian was five and Charlotte three when the god of road deaths took them. Todd had been thirty-nine. They were buried together at a funeral Rita couldn’t attend. She’d been in hospital. She’d had several ceremonies of her own since then, though.
She flipped the kettle on to boil while she went to the children’s room, a room that had become a shrine since Motorway Day. She took the broken wing mirror with her.
The door was white, panelled, with a rainbow arcing its way across the top section. Beneath it, in pink bubble writing, was each girl’s name. Beneath that, written in marker, was Todd’s. Beneath his name was a long list of others.
Rita went inside.
The beds were long gone, the shelves cleared of toys and trinkets. No posters adorned the walls. No dolls sat at window sills. This was not that sort of shrine.
“I offer you thanks for sparing me, and gratitude for preparing me, and I hope you will preserve me so I may serve you more,” she said to the room.
The first time she’d offered such prayers she’d felt foolish, like she was only playing, but it hadn’t taken long to realize her worship was true worship for there could be no other god, and after that it came much easier.
“I will add the names to the others when they are known to me,” Rita said, “though you know them now, better than I ever shall.”
There was nobody else in the room to hear her, but it was far from empty. Pushed up against the far wall was a bent and beaten shape of metals. An old engine bled its oil into the wooden floor, consecrating it, and attached to this dead heart were twists of exhaust and folded door panels. A buckled wedge of bonnet leant like a down-turned mouth, held in place by a length of bumper at its base upon which rested a row of jars like uneven teeth. Each jar was filled with broken windscreen glass, irregular shapes like uncut diamonds throwing back fractured light as Rita lit road flares on the bare floorboards. A couple of the jars held the broken plastic of shattered rear light covers; if the jars were teeth then these ones were bloody.
“I have another token,” Rita said. “Something to give you strength in giving you shape.”
She knelt and raised the broken mirror she’d taken from the day’s wreck, then stood and set it in place. Above the bonnet mouth Rita had nailed two tires to the wall like eyes, hubcaps resting inside to create silvered pupils that shone in the flare light. The fluffy dice dangled from one of them like bright tears of thinned blood. Tears of joy. Rita had been surprised at their presence in the boy’s car. A joke gift from parents, perhaps, on passing his test, or a gaudy pink piss-take from friends. Now they hung in Rita’s shrine as a reminder of the chance people took every time they drove the roads.
“There shall be no swerving from the road I follow and the road I follow is yours. I make you another offering. Accept her blood and the wreck of her metal, accept her sacrifice, just as you accepted mine.”
She put the wing mirror in one of the tire eye sockets and saw herself bisected in the broken glass. Her crooked nose. Her criss-crossed scars on the roadmap that was her new face. The bare scalp of burnt skin and the long wisps of hair that grew around it.
“I am yours,” she said. Facing the mirror, it looked as though she addressed herself, so she turned away from her reflection and said it louder. She filled the room with her devotion.
“I am yours!”
She knelt to her road god effigy, sobbing thankful frightened prayers in a circle of road flares and traffic cones.
Before her, rising up the wall in a mass of murderous metal, her god watched.
S
Both incidents were on the news. Rita watched from the sofa, eyes half-closed with sleep, as a pretty presenter told her the man near the churchyard had been William Thomas. Police were appealing for witnesses, apparently. The woman’s name, the one from the Nissan, had been Jennif
er James. The old man, Mr. Magoo, was actually Peter Birch.
Rita would add their names to the shrine room door. She would write them like licence plates, W1LL14M 7H0M45 and J3NN1F3R J4M35. She wouldn’t add the old man’s name. She would do it before bed. After the rest of the news. After resting her eyes for a moment. Just for a moment . . .
She was on the motorway again but the crash had already happened, which was not unusual; it meant her god was happy with what she’d given. What was unusual was the lack of people; Rita was the only one in any of the wreckages. The airbag had burst and the steering column had smashed her chest. An arch of the steering wheel was embedded in her flesh and her blood ran into her lap. She pressed the button to release the seat belt, just as she did in every dream, just as she had on the day, and of course she was still trapped in the car.
Movement in her peripheral vision drew her eyes to the wing mirror. It was broken, like the one she’d retrieved this morning.
“Help us,” Rita said, a bubble of blood popping on her lips.
“There is no us, not any more,” said the woman, “just you.” She crouched at where a window used to be. It was J3NN1F3R J4M35. “Hello.”
“Hello.”
“Strange place to keep a motorbike,” said J3NN1F3R, peering into the back seat.
“It’s my daughter’s.”
It wasn’t, but Rita couldn’t help saying so.
“Where’s W1LL14M?” Rita asked.
J3NN1F3R smiled. “B1LL? Oh, he’s around here somewhere. Nice trick with the fucking rabbit, by the way.” J3NN1F3R sharply turned a wheel she no longer held, an invisible wheel, and slammed her head hard to one side against nothing but air, reliving the “accident” in perfect detail. Her skull flattened on one side so severely that her right eye split and oozed from the socket. Her blonde hair reddened in fresh dark streaks. “Any other day and I wouldn’t have been on that road,” she said.