The two blinked and turned to the back seat. Things had been too quiet from their favorite font of verbal acid. "Jess?" Ramone called curiously.
Jessie was bowed forward, resting his forehead against the back of Simon's passenger seat. He looked limp of posture, sweaty, and flushed. His eyes were shut and he was anything but responsive. "I, uh… not…" he slurred, not finishing his sentence. It was just moments ago when he seemed fine!
"Shit. It's happening," Simon murmured. "There's no way this is a coincidence. What should we do?"
Ramone winced, thinking. "I'm taking this further in. We're gonna ride this out together, but I'm not feeling easy about this. There's a chance we go with him, right?"
"I think so, yeah... we physically cease to be here when it happens, if I recall correctly."
"Right. Out of sight, out of mind. I'm going to park it in the lot by the lake." Ramone had already been running the engine so he wasted little time making for an adjacent road.
"Is this a wise idea? I mean... red eyed people in town is one thing. But what if there's some strange stuff in the woods that we don't know about?"
"Not real worried about bug eyed squirrels right now, man. I'm worried about those whack jobs with guns who we know have it out for us. Besides, was there anything to suggest people on the other side don't go into the campgrounds like anyone else? Even if they think we're suspicious, we didn't see anything to suggest they're dangerous yet."
Simon cleared his throat. "I suppose you have a point. Alright, let's just make sure we stick together... I'm... I'm actually starting to feel kind of odd myself. Light headed, even."
"I'm going! I'm going!"
Ramone floored the pedal on the car, an incredibly reckless and ill-conceived thing to do in the shadow of Black Mountain's night. He knew the risks, the challenges. But he didn't want to get stuck on Black Mountain's other side in light of what he was just told. And how far did they have to be from another Voice like Aveir? He didn't have time to debate it.
The ride down Black Mountain was violent, to say the least. The car bounced angrily from monstrous potholes, rock debris, and Ramone taking curves in the road with frightening amounts of momentum. Simon gripped his seat with one hand and tried to keep Jessie focused with the other. He didn't want Jessie to suffer the potential issues of 'resisting' the Drifter infection, but he suspected the longer he could distract Jessie and keep him from passing out entirely, the more time they would have to safely get down the mountain. Fortunately, Black Beauty's frame was strong as Ramone pushed the suspension's patience was of some help. Jessie banged his head against the front of one of their seats no less than six times. He even slipped out an occasional obscenity, something which Simon considered a relief.
Ramone, meanwhile, was biting his lower lip and blasting Pantera on his stereo, hoping the music would keep him focused. Simon knew the look; he'd been along for a few of Ramone's street races. Against the really good drivers, Ramone would get that balls-to-the-wall expression and exist only in the moment of zone or pure reckless competition. He took some heart in that Ramone usually won, too.
What had been a cautious twenty five minute ride up the mountain, became a terrifying six minute drive down. Simon couldn't figure out how his Italian friend was even doing this, as he bounced and slammed about in his seat, gripping the side handle for stability. Surely, Black Beauty was taking some lumps on this one. But desperation took concern over almost everything else but safety, so the likelihood of future repairs had not dissuaded Ramone in the slightest, on what was probably the worst excuse for a series of local roads in one hundred miles. At the bare minimum, he did not want the Drifting taking place while en route going down the mountain. Power through a rough and stressful drive, Ramone aggressively reached the bottom in record time.
As they found themselves on the main highway, Ramone slammed his foot down hard on the gas. Simon watched the speedometer rise as the Challenger howled. Eighty… ninety… one hundred… one o' five… And it was somewhere along this time that Simon touched his brow for a moment, only to find it covered in beads of sweat. Could it be? Glancing hazily at Ramone, his hair was becoming increasingly wet with perspiration too. That's not just from the stress of driving down the mountain, is it?
Looking at his own hands and how they seemed to dance in his growing double vision and fatigue, Simon slouched back in his seat, not able to focus on Jessie any further. He was having trouble remembering what the urgency for all this speed was. Were they going somewhere important? Maybe if he just took a short nap, Ramone would wake them up when they got there.
Ramone, silent all the while and gritting his teeth, was secretly becoming delirious on his own as well. However, he wasn't quite as challenged by the sensation. Not yet. It wasn't his first time feeling this way… he wasn't proud of it, but there had been a few times he deserved to be pulled over after drinking to excess or nausea. He knew the feeling and how to attempt to fight against it, if just enough not to clip a mailbox on the way home. That said, he did not try to drink beyond his comfortable limit these days if he was going for a drive afterwards. Black Beauty or any of Old Man Peterson's cars were too precious to him, as if they were his own children. Sure, they could become dirty and sometimes a bandage was needed, but that came with the territory.
Glancing quickly to his side, he saw Simon collapsed in his seat against the passenger side door. In his rear view mirror, Jessie was slouched with his head resting on his shoulder and his mouth open. Ramone, although growing increasingly fatigued by the minute, felt adrenalin coursing through his veins. The more addled he became, the more he was able to focus, despite his growing delirium. He laughed, seemingly at nothing more than the stress and his situation. He was well over the speed limit, by a good forty miles an hour, racing against no one but himself and the Drifting. He was determined to win.
At some point, he reached the 4 H grounds… he couldn't remember how he reached there from the highway, but he did. And he needed to slow down. He wanted to reach the lake, but his one remaining hand on the steering wheel told him it wasn't going to happen. The man had already pushed himself to foreign limits and was, at best, seconds from slamming his own head down upon the steering wheel. Reality had become dream-like, overlapping with phantom assumptions of existing landscape, and a sky that seemed to change in color above him.
However, he had instincts. Maybe those very inner drives had lead him this far, despite his failing recollection. Reaching the parking lot, he slammed on the brakes, and hard turned the wheel while engaging the emergency brake moments later. Black Beauty spun between the wooden pole barriers in the lot, doing several aggressive donuts in the dirt.
Eventually, the vehicle groaned and came to a stop off to one of the sides, almost looking like a half assed parking job from an incompetent teenager. The lot was torn up with tire tracks, kicked up rock, and grit. But there sat Black Beauty, idling and very much not having crashed into any number of things present. The driver sat unconscious behind the wheel, a small trickle of life's blood running down from his nostrils, as he rested his head between the controlling apparatus and his own jacketed wrist. His chariot merely grumbled and waited for further commands that it would not receive.
And soon, the campgrounds were empty; leaving only donut tracks in the lot of what was surely some errant punk going for a joyride when no one was looking. It probably wasn't the first time. Chief Madley's finest wouldn't give such a thing a second glance. Especially when the culprits were as far from that mundane place as the cosmos were vast.
What commands the direction of these routes? These wandering paths, following as mist within the air, guided by silent eddies? How does one door not go in and out for the journeyman, but merely through? He casts aside maps and directions, and follows the pulse of something he does not understand, nor has the capacity for, consumed by instinctual itself. Should the road end, does it reveal what calling of the cosmos or some unknown aspect dictates these things within him? Where
he goes, there is ultimately no sun, shade, or color. Perhaps most daunting, with every step, he tastes the forfeiture of rhyme and reason within his pores.
I saw no tree this voyage. But, I saw but a thread. Because I am an ant and I cannot contemplate the sky's breadth.
Simon stirred from within his fever dream, slowly returning to cognition within the safe confines of Black Beauty. A trickle of blood ran from his nose to his lips and he felt somehow sicker for it. It wasn't some common grogginess or the nausea he knew last time. A burning pain in the back of his skull, near where the bones of the neck intersected, spoke of his bleeding. He felt hot, scorched even. Dazed and his limbs heavy, he lolled his head about and took account of what he could from behind his sunglasses.
Ramone was a sight of horror. He was slumped over his steering wheel entirely, but there was blood everywhere coming from his black haired head. Simon was too out of it to register the full implications of what that would have meant, given Ramone's collapsed pose, but he batted at his friend's elbow and muttered something that might have been his name.
Ramone mumbled incoherently, rolled his shoulder slightly, but did not move from his seating otherwise. Still, it was enough to show Simon the amount of blood that ran from his nose onto a white undershirt beneath his usual black leather jacket. It was a great deal more than Simon had bled, he was sure of that. Had they been in an accident? He tried to gaze outside the window, but his eyes refused to focus enough. So he slowly looked behind him.
Jessie sat with eyes half open, glinting in some light source that Simon had not yet registered. There was a lot of drying sweat on Jessie's brow, but scarcely any blood at all from his nose. Noticing Simon's attention, he spoke with a dull mumble. "You all… look… like shit." Simon could only grunt in affirmation, although he didn't really think about it too much. The world was a haze.
They sat in the silent Challenger, slowly, but gradually coming to terms with what was going on. Even Ramone eventually lifted his head, revealing the large smears of blood all over his face. But it confirmed to Simon that he did not bang his head; Ramone bore no visible injuries, he was just a mess.
"Does… anyone else's head hurt? Like, really hurt? I need an aspirin or something," Simon eventually slurred out, as he began to straighten up.
"If you're bleeding all over the place, that's probably not the best thing to take," said Jessie, who was leaning back with a hand over his eyes. "That said, no, my head does not hurt that badly. My eyes do a little, sure."
Ramone coughed, seemingly the most destroyed of the three. "Speak for yourself. I may… have the worst hangover I've ever known. My eardrums are even on fire. Whisper if you can."
Now able to take in his surroundings, although that burning sensation in his head still gnawed at him, Simon observed Ramone's car sitting in park, stalled out. The lights were on and the stereo was idle, with the music CD having long since finished. But a quick review of the dashboard revealed a complete lack of fuel. Black Beauty must have been sitting around for quite some time, although Simon wasn't sure of how much gasoline they’d had after racing down from the Silver Light.
"So, uh, are we in… la la land or whatever you guys call it?" Jessie asked. "Because this looks just like the 4 H campgrounds and absolutely nothing else. I expected something more, I guess."
Ramone chuckled, but immediately winced from the sensation. "Agh… at least we made it down the mountain safe." His eyes were mostly closed, reeling from what bothered him. "Anyone see any red eyed people around? Eh, you can't really mistake them for the normal Drezzies."
Jessie and Simon looked around, but they were alone. And things did look pretty normal. "I don't see any of them, let anyone period, but I can't tell if we're on the other side or not," Simon reported, scanning the scene. "We're parked funny and out of gas. But yeah, this could be either place. I mean, I've no idea how much fuel you had, but maybe we were unconscious so long that we just popped back to normal Dresden Port by now."
Ramone could only give an exasperated throw of his hands. "No idea… look, we're out of fuel, right? Can I ask an unreasonable favor? Can you push Black Beauty here into a proper parking spot? We're asking for attention like this. Also, gonna need you to tell me which way to crank the wheel, I can't see very well right now. My head is pounding. It's like the mother of all migraines."
"Yeah…" Jessie muttered simply. He had nothing to add, but he knew he was somewhat dependent on what apparent expertise Ramone and Simon had with this situation. Assuming he would mostly be a liability (a thought that widely bothered him) in red eyed world due to his greenhorn status within it, he wanted to be helpful if he could. "Just know you've still got the emergency brake on, so disengage it."
Simon exited the car shortly thereafter as Jessie was surveying the scene, both in wonderment of what could be and for the simple task of navigating Ramone's car into a halfway normal looking parking job, with a blinded man behind the wheel. Simon breathed in the air, and for once, it was dry and woodsy. He was growing tired of the cold dampness about the area as of recent. His bones, at least, loathed it. "Alright, we're good. Park it and come on out."
Soon, the three boys stood aside Ramone's Challenger, looking all the part like survivors of a nasty car accident. Ramone himself had just scarcely opened his eyes at this point, but he felt as bad as he appeared. For the most part, they spent several moments searching about for signs of interdimensional oddness.
"So…" Jessie began with dubiousness, "This looks like any time we've gone down to the grounds. And I don't feel significantly different. Seems like all we had to show for all of this is various degrees of nose bleeding and migraines. Uh, is it supposed to 'feel' worse if you've been here multiple times?"
"No idea. And well, we don't know where we're at just yet," Simon reminded. "When we were in red eyed world, it looked like everything else; for the most part, just the streets were set up different. I mean, it still looked like Dresden Port, just designed differently."
Ramone coughed dryly. "I've got a thought…" he said, his throat hoarse with strain, "It was something Aveirasen mentioned to me. Guess she didn't tell you, Simon?"
Simon looked at him with curiosity. "She told me a lot of things, man. Which one were you thinking of?"
"About resisting the Drifting's infection," he groaned. "I thought it just meant the first time. But, we were racing like speed freaks down Black Mountain and you were in and out, Jess. We were worried about getting separated or being too close to Aveirasen with Simon around… apparently it causes some kinda fatal error if everyone enters the Drifting together. By that, I mean two Voices. That's how it, um, works? Right?"
"You're correct. I don't know anything about resisting the Drifting, though," Simon confirmed, folding his arms. "She was a little odd with how she shared information."
"Yeah, well… resisting was explained to me as trying to hold off on the whole Drifting thing. Or so I understood it. Simon and I were trying our damnest not to black out on the ride over. We figured the lake at the campgrounds here were a good close spot, maybe safer than not. But we didn't have a lot of time to begin with and we were all fading out. I guess trying not to pass out counts as resisting it. Getting nosebleeds and migraines seems to be the punishment that comes alongside that."
"Hmm. Live and learn, I suppose," said Simon.
Ramone shot him a rare dirty look. "If your headache was half the bitch this one was, you might not be saying that."
Jessie, meanwhile, kept his ears open as he wandered around, trying to determine anything unusual about their location. He was the least distracted by the complications of resisting and was more than curious about what was so unusual about this place, if anything. But so far, nothing was really peculiar. Pinecones looked like they always did. The trees, rocks, and reeds were as normal as ever. And there were common birds flying overhead. Jessie sighed. It seemed like they were going through a lot of trouble for what seemed to be nothing at all. He remembered what Simon said ab
out the red eyed world and that everything he had seen so far would not have contradicted it, but he couldn't help but feel a little disappointed.
Walking back, Jessie found Simon and Ramone still carrying on about their symptoms, ultimately broaching no new territory from several minutes ago. "Well, if you guys are done verbally walking in circles, why don't we go to that lake down the road? Assuming it was half as good of an idea as you thought, you can at least clean up. I can’t stand to see either of you right now. You both look like you got drunk while competing at the county fair's raspberry pie eating contest."
They looked at each other and had to concede the point. And at least they knew Jessie was feeling like his usual cantankerous self. Ramone, who was probably a bit susceptible to suggestion at the moment, started down the road first after a passive nod. Simon soon followed, alongside Jessie.
The walk through the grounds was relatively soothing and it seemed to be early morning, perhaps no later than eight o' clock. Birds serenaded the boys with their chirpy songs and squirrels foraged about for whatever they could hoard or bury for later. All in all, it was a pleasant, if short journey to the body of water, a small lake called Anekagustah. It was probably named after members of the Tetani tribe, who were relocated here in the late seventeen to early eighteen hundreds, during a less than proud moment in the nation's history.
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