by Ray Cluley
“It wasn’t any other day,” said Rita.
“No.”
“The road gets what the road wants.”
“The road wants more,” said J3NN1F3R. “It always wants more.”
“And it wants you too,” said W1LL14M, suddenly beside her. Where Todd should have been.
“It wants you too,” said J3NN1F3R after, overlapping his words.
Which was where the motorcycle, as always, made its whoomph! and sudden heat engulfed her and Rita woke up.
The news was still on. Rita turned it off and watched the screen die. She went upstairs, wrote two more names on the door, and went to bed.
S
Rita pressed the accelerator firmly to the floor, enjoying the speed. Every pothole, every bounce, took the car out of her control for a moment, but she always managed to steer it back on course. It was late afternoon, and a wet one. Occasionally she’d speed through a lake-like puddle (the country roads were full of them) and a fantail of muddy water would arc to the side and behind. The tires would slip but they always found their grip again. Of course they did; her god protected her. Each life she gave it went towards preserving hers. She had removed traffic cones and flashing lights from construction work and skips. She had turned into oncoming traffic, dazzling with full beam headlights, laid barbed wire across muddy tracks. She had let air out of tires. She had once drugged coffee at a late night petrol station (but only once; it had been difficult) and she had stepped in front of speeding vehicles (hood down, face on show) time and time again. But as high as mortality rates were on the road, as easy as it was to have an accident, annual casualties were on the decrease, with recent years providing an all time statistical low. Car designs improved, the number of airbags increased, seat belts were compulsory, driving tests became harder; it was getting more difficult to die on British tarmac. Yet Rita’s god was a bloodthirsty god, more bloodthirsty than anything Aztec or Viking, and so Rita made her offerings, contributing in her way in an attempt to readdress the balance. Her god, eager for more, would keep her safe.
The speedometer tipped eighty. She was racing away from something that didn’t show in her rear view mirror, though occasionally it was there in her reflection. No, she was racing towards something, something new, a future with her god of crash. She was racing towards . . .
A Citroen. It was blue, like the one from Motorway Day. There was a child in the back, who turned to look out the window at Rita. She was saying something Rita couldn’t hear. A sign beside the girl showed Bob the Builder proclaiming “Baby on board” but the girl was actually about three.
Rita slowed down, but not much. Staying close.
The driver, a woman, kept glancing in the rear view. She was speeding up even as the man beside her waved an arm out the window for Rita to pass. A family. In a blue Citroen. It was exactly what the road wanted. It would be fucking karma.
Car-mar.
The Citroen was flashing its brake lights. It would have to stop soon to give right of way; they were approaching a junction. But Rita continued tailgating the woman, pushing her into the sort of panic her god thrived upon. She’d be uttering curse words that Rita’s god would take as hymns, an anxiety-heightened mantra that tenderised the meat and mind for the road god’s pleasure.
The car turned into the other lane to let her pass. Rita turned with it. The Citroen swerved back into the correct lane but did not give way at the junction, couldn’t give way, and Rita’s god of roads and ruin delivered a Ford Fiesta because Rita was a perfect follower, she was car-ma, and all she needed now was a fucking Vauxhall Astra and a motorcycle. The Fiesta hit the Citroen and the Citroen spun and startled expressions of horror blurred past Rita.
Their vehicle clipped her rear bumper. Suddenly she was spinning with them in a tire-squealing tango. She tried to correct the spin, pumping the brakes, but the car jolted against something. Rita’s head smacked the glass to her right, just like J3NN1F3R’s had. The airbag filled the space around her but darkness engulfed her first.
S
Rita lay across the steering wheel but she wasn’t on the country road. She was on the motorway. She peered over the ridges of her folded bonnet looking for Sian. A long thick line of blood, drawn from face and flesh, marked her path. It had connected Carina’s car to Sian’s corpse but Carina was Rita now so Sian wasn’t there. The bloodline ended at nothing but ruin, the only body parts those of broken vehicles bent into new shapes.
Todd’s seat beside her held the engine block, steam rising in lines where his blood had splashed. The motorcycle behind her, inside the car, thrummed and growled but Charlotte did not scream. Charlotte was not there. The growl diminished gradually until all Rita heard was the crunch of glass underfoot as someone approached. They knelt to look in at Rita. It was not J3NN1F3R or B1LL or any of the others. It was the fucking doctor.
“Hello Carina.”
Rita pretended not to hear.
“I know you can hear me,” he said, but he stroked his beard away from his mouth as if it may have muffled his words. “You’re still hurting, aren’t you.”
“Actually, no,” she said, and it was true. Rita was not in pain. It was a dream.
Doctor Hooper glanced down at his watch, then at the vehicle behind her, waiting to burn.
“You know what you’re trying to do, don’t you?”
Always the fucking questions, trying to force her to voice her thoughts. To force what was inside to come outside. But that would make her roadkill, so she said nothing. Instead, she waited impatiently for the whoomph!
“You’re trying to die,” Doctor Dipshit said. “An interpretation of your dreams suggests—”
Rita shook her head.
“The road always gets what the road wants,” he said. He was reading from a pad he had never used during their sessions. “Well, the road wants you too.”
And suddenly 5T4C3Y was there—“It wants you too”—and D4V1D—“It wants you too”—and C1ND1—“It wants you too”—and all of the others, H4RRY and K1M83RLY and GR3G0RY, all of them, even T0DD and S14N and CH4RL0TT3, each overlapping the last so Rita couldn’t hear what they said after the first time.
“Well the road can’t fucking have me!” Rita yelled.
Now the motorcycle would go up in flames—whoomph!—and hair and skin would crack, crackle, blister, burn, and she’d wake up, and—
Hooper was still there. They all were.
“The road wants you—” Hooper began.
“I know! Shit, I thought I was the one with the compulsion to repeat.”
He had told her about that in the hope of getting her to talk about the “accident.” He didn’t understand her god, didn’t understand her god had willed it, demanded it, for her ignorance. She didn’t dream it every single fucking time because she grieved or missed her family or even because of any guilt but because it was a way of lessening her pain, according to the doctor. Talking about it, reliving it, was supposed to do the same, a coping strategy he’d said would turn passive suffering into active control. Well that was bullshit. She’d found her own way to control things.
“I’m not trying to die,” Rita told him. “Carina wanted to die, and she did. Rita wants to force her pain onto others. Rita turns her ‘destructive impulse’”—she made speech marks in the air—“onto others. There’s my ‘compulsion to repeat’ you fucking Freud.”
She’d meant to say fraud. It was almost funny.
“How many more?” he asked.
“At least one,” she said, wishing she could make it H00P3R.
“One more for the road, huh?”
“Yeah, one more. For the road.”
She knew what he would say next and this time she would let him, hoping for the fiery wakeup that would end it all.
“The road wants you to—”
And he told her. And once he’d explained what the road wanted her to do—
Whoomph!
S
Ahead, the Citroen was bent in half around a telephone pole. A man lay draped across a hole in the windscreen. The only sign of the Fiesta was a ragged hole in the low redbrick wall where it had plunged down an embankment. Rita checked the road behind her, switched on her hazard lights, and went to see.
The Fiesta had rolled all the way to the bottom. It was upside down.
Rita approached the Citroen at the telephone pole. “Is everybody hurt?”
She felt for a pulse at the man’s neck. There was nothing. The blood that would have given him one was running into puddles at the roadside.
The woman driver lay head back, mouth open, as if sleeping. She wasn’t sleeping. Her eyes were open. Both of them were red where the white should be. She had a curve across her brow that matched the shape of the steering wheel and something had cracked to leak pink-tinged fluid down her forehead. Blood trickled from her mouth like drool.
One of the passenger doors had been thrown open, wrenched from its hinges. There was no sign of the girl that should have been inside, just the usual clutter of a family car and . . . Something else. Something that surprised her.
She heard the sound of an approaching engine; someone was coming. But she was at a crossroads far more metaphorical than the one she could see before her. She knew what she was supposed to do, her internal satnav had told her, but she still didn’t know if the doctor could be trusted.
The approaching engine was closer. It sounded like the growl of a motorcycle.
Rita reached in to the car quickly and took her souvenir before rushing back to where her own car was parked.
She drove away fast, rushing home with her offering.
S
“I have made my offerings and my offerings give you strength,” Rita said, safe in the shrine room. She had to shout over the noise. “But it is not enough. It will never be enough. You have my worship, but it will never be enough.
“So you will have the worship of others.”
She motioned to her latest construction, standing beside the blood-toothed smile of her god.
She had made it from a car boot lid with upright bars made of extendable head rests welded in place. Above it, radio antennas had been bent into criss-crossed shapes and hanging from those, turning gently on the mobile, were various air fresheners and dashboard toys and key rings. She’d made the crib’s bedding from seat covers, but they itched the child that wailed inside. She would add its old name to the door, below those of its old family, and give the child something new. She would bring the baby on board to share her worship, nurse it with milk and spilled diesel, keep it safe.
And so she went to it, held it close, clutching at the scripture written in the scars of her skin, feeling the ridges of ragged flesh on her puckered chest where her breasts used to be.
The first of her god’s new followers would suckle from her undying faith.
The Man Who Was
I stand upon a bank of sand in the middle of a sea that is entirely shore. I’m in the dark desert again, alone, and I know that I am dreaming not just because I’m in my pyjamas but because I’ve dreamt this many times before. My fists are clenched and grains of sand slip between my fingers, though I clench them tight. Because I clench them tight. Before me, the smoking ruins of tanks lay smouldering in the sand. It’s night; I know they’re smouldering because I can feel the heat, and smell the hot metal. It’s a familiar scene. Not because of any experience I had there: I did not fight in the Gulf War, not for a single minute of its one hundred hours. It’s familiar because of John.
The nearest wreckage is Iraqi. Almost all of the ruined vehicles are Iraqi. Still clutching the sand in my fists, I make my way to a turret that has become separated from the main body of the vehicle it once belonged to. Each ruined chassis is a dark footprint of war, walking away into the Arabian Desert only to stop suddenly, a route like an instructive dance map that starts and stops within itself, and the turrets protrude in bent and twisted shapes from the ground around them like dark growths. War flowers, budding. I know, because John told me, that the Americans called these tanks “pop-tops” due to the way they broke apart when hit, turrets flung clean into the air. They lie scattered before me, a field of blackened metal blossoms cast aside to wilt by some dancing warmonger giant.
I hear him call out from one of the wrecks. John. Man of my dreams, to make a cliché literal. His voice is deep and clear and familiar at first. Then it fills with pain. I try to go to him. I run. I know he’s in one of the American vehicles, a Bradley, and I let go of the sand to run faster. As the last of the sand is taken by the wind, so his screaming stops.
And that’s when I wake up.
Usually, that’s when I wake up.
S
General John Smith; a name so plain, you’d think him made up.
I first saw him across a crowd of people at some charity event or dinner, the sort of occasion I usually hate to attend but find, as an occupational hazard, that I often must. It’s my job to plan such events and I do it well; give me the internet and a phone and I can arrange anything. I can even mingle and make polite conversation and though I’m reluctant to talk much about myself, I can feign an interest in others. The General, though, aroused my full genuine interest, and did so immediately.
The event was black tie of course, and he cut a striking figure even amongst so many men dressed identically. Because of it, probably. He certainly wore his suit better than I mine. He stood at about six feet with the rigid bearing of a man who has served in the military, though his hair was much longer and glossier than military regulation probably allowed. Similarly, he had a very non-regulation beard. Neatly trimmed, lining his jaw in such a precise way as to emphasize the strength of it rather than hide any weakness of it, as many men with facial hair are inclined to do. When he smiled, which I saw him do frequently in his conversation, he flashed teeth that were movie-star straight and white, all the brighter for their appearance within his dark beard.
I fear my description doesn’t reveal him accurately at all.
“I see you’ve noticed the General.”
My companion took a sip from his champagne but the glass did little to hide his smile. He knew me better than most.
“The General?”
He’d said it like I was supposed to know who. I didn’t. My companion had scored a point in the trivial game of gossip that thrives in such environments. I had guessed already, though, that the man I was drawn to had a military background. It was in his bearing, not only the straight way in which he held himself but in the confidence with which he moved between groups of people. He was not the host of the event but he commanded the crowd as if he was.
“General John Smith,” my companion explained, and rolled his eyes either because I hadn’t known or because the name sounded so phoney. Perhaps for both reasons. I didn’t care; I was happy enough staring.
“You’ll never guess how old he is,” he added, admiring the man. “Served in the Gulf. Served after that, too, from what I’ve heard. Bloody hell, he looks good for it. Bet he’s had some work done.”
I disagreed, but kept my opinion to myself. Or maybe I simply hoped otherwise, seeing it as a vanity I hoped the man did not possess.
“Now he’s set for politics.”
“Swapping one battlefield for another?”
He smiled politely at my joke. “Ferocious man, by all accounts. In a good way, I mean.” Here my companion widened his eyes at me. “Imagine.”
I disguised my thoughts at that by turning to a passing waiter, swapping my empty glass for a full one.
“Women love him, of course,” my companion went on, “on account of his tremendous bravery.”
“His bravery?”
/> “Well, obviously not only on account of that. He’s a man of calibre, if you’ll excuse the military pun.”
I excused it by ignoring it. “Did he see much of the war?” I asked. I knew little of the Gulf War except that it was brief.
“See much of it? You really haven’t heard of General Smith?”
I admitted as much, caring little for the man’s petty persistence in embarrassing me.
He pressed the advantage.
“Christ, really? Nothing of what he did in Kuwait?”
Again, I shook my head no.
“I tell you, to look at him is to become infatuated, but to hear something of his character? What he did in the desert? Doomed.” He said this last theatrically, tapping my glass as if to toast the prospect. “To a life of love and longing.”
We drank to that, and I surprised myself by doing so with enthusiasm.
“So what did happen out there?”
He raised an eyebrow, delighting in my ignorance. “Okay, quick version; he’s the man who—”
But my companion had no time to explain, for the man who was the topic of our conversation was fast approaching.
The term statuesque is the staple of old fiction, terrible romances, but the proportions of him did indeed seem carved, solid; something the Greeks would marvel at and try to imitate in their art. His poise was perfect, his movements smooth as if choreographed.
“Gentlemen.”
One word, and I felt something of the doom I’d been warned against. The General’s voice was strong and clear, with the clipped assuredness of breeding but not too Ivy League. I found my own voice lacking, and so it fell to my friend to make the introductions.