by Tim Curran
What the fuck have they done? He thought. The horse turned its head towards Terry, its hunger motivating it much more than the last time it tasted flesh. Black Beauty was no longer a horse, but some kind of monster. Terry couldn’t imagine how this all had come to be, or why William Marsh would do this to his horse. Surely this could not be better than death?
Selfish fucking bastard, Terry said under his breath.
Terry pulled his cell phone to call the police, but he realized how crazy he would sound explaining the situation, and hesitated. Standing there with his phone open and the numbers punched in, a call-button away from turning over this horror to people far more prepared, he considered what he would say. The more he tried to organize his thoughts and words, the more insane the whole thing had sounded to him. In all truth, he really had no idea what was happening here, but as he remembered his goat, and the fucked up kid Willy was always hanging around with, he started figure it out. The cops would never believe this story, and would probably write it off as the horse never was dead, despite how absolutely sure of that Terry had been at the time.
From the opposite corner of the barn, a moaning grabbed Terry’s attention. He looked over to find the other victim of his accident. Sarah sat balled up in the corner, covered in blood herself. Terry quickly put together that the horse had attacked her. She was making noise, but her head hung between her legs rested on her knees, and he could not see exactly where her wounds might be.
Without any further consideration of the scene, Terry brought his shotgun up and emptied its chamber into the horse’s skull. In a second movement, the length of a breath, he reloaded and pumped two more shells into Black Beauty. What remained of the body hit the floor, and evidence covered the wall behind it. The body twitched, just enough for Terry to reload yet again, though this time as he did, Sarah lifted her head.
Her eyes were pitch black, void of any emotion. Her mouth was agape, and she seemed to be hissing at him. He saw that her neck and shoulder were all torn up, he guessed by the horse’s teeth. The neck wound was no doubt fatal, and most of her shoulder missing, yet she stood there, eyeing him like some wild animal, threatening him with her open mouth and raspy growls. Terry had seen shit like this in a movie once, and his instinct took over. In the exact second that she leaped for him, arms out, mouth stretched more than humanly possible, he emptied his last two rounds into her, splattering almost her entire torso throughout the barn.
THE ROO
Anthony Wedd
He wasn’t sure why he’d picked her up. He was glad though; it was working out.
When he’d first seen her at the roadhouse outside Keerawarra, he’d thought she looked scruffy, like most backpackers do. The proprietor had said something about her wanting a ride and asked where he was headed. It would have been easy to lie and say anything, and he almost had. Misgivings had flooded into his mind. She might have friends waiting in the dining room. Or - equally intimidating - she might not. What would they possibly talk about? He pictured hours of awkward silence, made worse by infrequent attempts at stilted conversation. What if she wanted to use the toilet, or get food? She might want to smoke in the car. She’d probably smell.
But the town the man had mentioned was where he was headed. The girl had looked over at him and her face was curious, not sullen and expectant. Without thinking about it further he’d nodded and said “sure.” Her face had lit up and she’d bounded off her stool like a kelpie.
He’d gone outside to warm up the car while she paid for her food. An anxious expression flickered across her face as she exited. Maybe she thought he’d driven off without her. Her breath misted in the night air. He’d leaned out of the front door and waved and she gambolled over, opening the back door to stow her pack. Finally she’d thumped into the passenger seat and flashed him a thankful smile.
They’d gotten underway, abandoning the beacon of the roadhouse for the engulfing pitch of the outback. To his relief, it wasn’t awkward. The girl, Shane as it turned out, chatted with him amiably. She was from London, where she worked as a technical writer. That pleased him. She must be older than she looked. She'd flipped through his CDs with seemingly genuine interest, and even played one. She did smell a bit, but it wasn’t too bad.
His high beams lit a strip of grey roadway and gravelly shoulder that scrolled endlessly past the nose of the car. Anonymous ranks of roadside markers filed past on either side, their cyclopean red eyes gleaming blankly. The car formed a sanctuary against the vastness that pressed against the road like a chill shroud. In mid sentence, Shane pulled off her hooded sweatshirt with a single motion, revealing a faded T-shirt that read BAD KITTY. There was a picture below the caption, but he couldn’t make it out without staring at her chest. She continued talking about her travels as if oblivious to his glances. She swore quite a bit, but her accent made it oddly appealing. Her hand wriggled through her hair like worms in dark earth.
Incandescent moths streaked and weaved out of the gloom, giving their juicy lives against the windscreen with the soft tap of a fingernail. A white glow lit the horizon for minutes before its source appeared – a distant array of lights like a deep sea behemoth that lazily swelled towards them until suddenly its dazzling eyes filled the world. The humped dark shape dwarfed the car as it roared buffeting past, threatening to send them twirling skyward in its lingering musky wake.
“Wow,” said Shane. “They’re awesome.” She would be sick of them before the night was out, he reflected.
She sniffed. “Is that animals it’s carrying?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Sheep or cattle, probably. You know, cows.” The nervous qualification felt a bit stupid. Of course she would know what cattle were. But she nodded without comment.
They soon approached a turnoff the GPS had heralded for some time. It was unsigned and looked quite desolate for a major road, but he took it with outward nonchalance. Something was dead there – a small thing, half bulbous and furry, half pressed road flower. Its shadow slid wraithlike across the ground suggesting movement, but it was just the turning lights of the car.
They picked up speed again along the narrow road. Stunted bushes punctuated its verge like distorted grey bodies. Beyond them the dark unknown spread out to a featureless horizon blacker than the sky. Shane slumped down in her seat and put her feet up on the dashboard. That perturbed him a bit – her shoes might leave marks - but he didn’t want to jeopardise the rapport they’d developed. He didn’t think his glance had been noticeable, but she withdrew her legs almost immediately.
The CD finished, leaving a vacuum of silence. Behind the monotonous sucking hiss of the car's motion, he wondered if Shane had fallen asleep, but then she sprang upright. “Can I put one of mine on?” she asked, he assumed rhetorically, for she was already unbuckling and twisting around. “Sure,” he said redundantly. She half crawled into the back seat and zipped and rustled around with her pack. He reached over her and turned the interior light on. There was a muffled “thank you,” more rustling, then she thrashed and lunged forward with her prize.
He put the light out, allowing darkness to flood the car once more. Shane’s CD started with a crash and screaming. She had the volume louder than he usually liked, but that was a bit exciting. He found himself accelerating in response. Shane leaned down to worry at something near the floor and then her feet, bare now, appeared on the dash again. That was tolerable, he decided. She was never still, head nodding to the music, now mouthing the words, now drinking from a plastic bottle. She had a small tattoo on her ankle which held his gaze for a moment, but he couldn’t tell what it was.
He turned back to the road and a kangaroo lurched from between two bushes, as though flushed out by the music. He saw its head in profile, eye blazing, way too close. There was no way they wouldn't hit it, yet his instincts spun the wheel and crushed the brake as his conscious mind emptied of everything but vertigo and panic. He felt a sickening juicy crunch and veered further. The wheels shuddered as they left the road
. A tree loomed, its pale trunk lurking behind grey billows of foliage. Then somehow they were past it, still on the road, accelerating again.
Chest hammering, he looked across at Shane. She looked back at him and abruptly broke into song, her mouth wide, wailing along with the CD as though trying to drown something out. He wasn't sure what to do, and let his gaze drift wordlessly askance with a half smile. Her ankle tattoo caught his eye, and he saw clearly that it was a cat, stylised and in repose. BAD KITTY.
His head ached excruciatingly from the shock of the ordeal. At least the car seemed no worse for wear, rushing smoothly and silently through the night. He was slightly disturbed by a burning smell. Must be the brakes, he thought. A leafy eucalyptus smell also invaded the car, unnaturally strongly. Perhaps something in Shane's pack had spilled. Her voice trailed off and he noticed that the CD had stopped too. In the silence he heard something much quieter – a choke, or maybe a sob. Was she crying?
He glanced over at her, and she let out another hitching moan. He was about to say something, but her tattoo distracted him again. How had he thought it was a cat? It looked nothing like one.
“What’s that on your leg?” he asked. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably and suddenly realised he was cold. The heater was blowing icy air right into his face. Shane's only response was a muffled whimpering. He hazarded another glance. The thing on her ankle was a kangaroo in profile, like the road signs.
He fiddled with the heating controls but it didn't help. The air was freezing. Perhaps that was what was making his head ache so badly. Surely Shane had noticed it too. Still and melancholy, she seemed fragile, as though a twig could break her. He wondered if she had anywhere to stay after this. That might be what was upsetting her. Should he offer to share his room?
Shane leaned towards him. “Um... when we get there? Can I... stay with you?” she asked, as though reading from his thoughts. “I don't really have...” Her lower lip was trembling. She was crying again, small breathy squeaks of distress. What should he say to her? It was so cold. They had to get this heater working. Dust obscured the road ahead. His head pounded. Her face was very pale in the soft glow of the dashboard lights.
“God, it's freezing,” he said. The leafy sap smell was very strong.
“Yes, it's... don't worry, I'll... can I tell you...” she began, leaning even closer to him.
...and coughed a hot spray of blood into his face.
His hands had left the steering wheel. Lunging to return them sent him flopping against the driver's side door. They weren’t moving; the car rested at some kind of crazy angle. The windscreen had dissolved into a crazy mass of cracks swimming against the opaque milkiness of the car's airbag. Nothing beyond it but swirling brightly lit dust.
Frigid air poured in. Blood slopped thickly like black treacle from Shane’s lips. She was a spectre, all pale face and wide terrified eyes, coughing and sobbing up blood. Somehow, there was a tree in the car. It grew in through Shane's half of the windscreen. Her face, inches from his own, was pressed awkwardly against the jagged stump of a branch.
Crashed. They’d crashed. How? It didn’t matter. They had to get out. Something might explode. How badly was Shane hurt? For that matter, how badly was he hurt? The glass beneath his face was a web of striations with a bloody spider at the centre. His temple pulsed with agony, overriding any other signals his body might be sending. He moved his arms experimentally, then lifted one to touch his head. Sticky. Painful. He didn't want to press because of the pain, and because whatever it was like up there, it felt soft. He gripped the seat belt instead, feeling its comforting constriction. It couldn't be too bad, he was conscious and moving. Shane was the one he should be worried about.
“Can you move?” he asked. She didn't reply. Her unfocussed eyes stared past him, blinking as rapidly as her breath. Sinister broken cusps flashed white in her swollen mouth as she coughed again, speckling his cheek and lips with more warm gobbets. One side of her face was rent by a black gouge from which a flap of skin dangled like a peel. Her sobs sounded choked, as though her real cries were too big to get out. Perhaps she had more injuries that were preventing her from screaming or even breathing properly. He forced himself to look down at her lower body, a nightmare of crushed mince and diced bone fragments parading across his mind. What he saw looked OK, though much of it was obscured by bits of the tree. Maybe she could get out too, with his help.
The engine ticked like a cooling corpse. His door opened straight into the ground, but the gap was just wide enough. He wrenched himself out into the freezing gloom like an astronaut, staggering as his footfalls sent ripples of dizziness and pain across his perception. Steadying himself against the roof, he surveyed their plight.
Half of the car was angled upward as though it had tried to climb the tree. Most of the front was crushed into a steaming concave metal grimace. A big complicated branch impaled the windscreen on Shane's side. Their one remaining headlight stared vacantly into the clearing nebula of dust. Surely this couldn't really be happening. He wanted to snap out of this nightmare and go back to the world where they were speeding along, whole and intact. He wouldn't crash this time.
He should help Shane, get her out of the car. Or should he not move her? He tried to remember what you were supposed to do. All he could summon was the title of an unread leaflet – BEFORE HELP ARRIVES. Had there been another vehicle involved in the crash? He couldn't remember. But if there had been, there might be other injured people nearby. Or people who could help.
He set off down the road to look. Outside the artificial car world everything was exaggeratedly real and ponderous. Distances were no longer ephemeral but lingered and fought him with drifts of snarling gravel and clutching tussocks of wild grass. The cold bit into him like a shark. Surfaces and objects became less distinct as he moved away from the hazy glow of the car, as though the darkness framing the road was seeping onto it. The sky glowed and burned with a million white needles, blasting down a deafening wave of vastness.
Something was lying on the road ahead of him.
A piece of flotsam washed up low and vague in the diffuse starlight glow. He opened his mouth to call out to the shape but his voice choked against the silent vacuum. He would just walk up quietly and see for himself. A piece of tyre? Too big. An animal?
He smelled it just as the suggestion of fur and muscle coalesced out of the haze. A dead animal. The heavy stench spoke of something half decayed, of noxious emissions through torn orifices in matted hide. Of exposed bony secrets mottled with dried decay and flies. It got worse as he approached, but he wanted the closure of seeing exactly what it was.
With an unexpected stab of dread, he saw it was a kangaroo. Jumbled images from before the accident flashed across his mind. Had they hit this, or crashed trying to avoid it? No, it had obviously been dead for quite a while. It wasn't just the smell. Now that he was close he could see other things. Some of the skin around the face and mouth had been eaten away. Lower incisors jutted in an expression made blank and savage by the eyeless crater above them. The entire pelt was wrinkled and split. He imagined if he tried to move the carcass, it would tear like rotting carpet. Whoever had hit this kangaroo had done so some time ago.
He should get back to Shane. He might walk forever looking for some phantom vehicle or animal they had hit or not hit, and she needed his help now. Yet something was odd. He looked at the kangaroo again. At the mangy chest, partially ruptured and sunken as though from an impact. At the black textured mess, glistening faintly, strewn from the body as though it were a dropped jar. The thing was certainly not in great shape, but nor was it flattened with days or weeks of inattentive tyre tracks. If it wasn't for the stench and decomposition, you would almost think -
He jumped backwards, flesh bristling, watchful. The entire corpse was teeming with surreptitious movement. Tiny sections of fur bulged and relaxed as though something underneath was shifting about. Where fur and skin were missing, the darkness exposed seemed to shift and
undulate. Maggots, he thought, or some other parasite. He stepped forward again in spite of himself and saw what it was.
Worms. The entire thing was infested with long, dark worms. He couldn't make out much detail but they definitely weren't maggots, at least not the ones he knew of. They were much larger, long gelatinous threads ringed with segments like beachworms, oozing thickly under gaps in the hide like glistening rivers. In the silence he imagined he could hear the putrescent squirming warren that must exist inside the kangaroo. He vomited, the heavy throbbing in his head reaching a grey crescendo with the effort. Looking down, he saw that even the stain on the road writhed with worms. The thought of them crawling blindly around his feet sent him stumbling away, kicking and stomping in revulsion.
Despite the pain he half jogged back to Shane and the car, disgust and urgency compelling him in equal measure. Nothing had changed. He opened the passenger door and there she was, half hidden by the branch, forlorn and still. Had she died while he wasted time? No, her head lolled semi-conscious towards him when he spoke softly and threaded an arm through to touch her shoulder. Time to get her out. He snapped and peeled twigs and small branches to clear a tunnel. Leaves rustled like dead insects. He could see more of her body and for a horrible moment he thought a branch had impaled her, but she was just wedged behind it. He ducked under the main limb toward her. Urgent broken agony rolled into his temple like blood, but he pressed forward and gathered her in an awkward one-armed embrace. Her breath rasped unevenly in his ear, a hopeful sound. She'd looked slight but she was so heavy, and he had to be very careful. Each time she shifted, hellish images plagued him - internal trickles exploding into bloody fountains, splintered ribs sawing against organs like violin strings.