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= THOSE SKID MARKS ON THE ROADS =

Dark Fantasy

by John Argo

14.

They were someplace cold, dark, and rainy.

Mick struggled with himself, trying to be conscious. He remembered the events of the last few seconds—the wrenching, the sound of tires making desperate and tortured skid marks on the freeway—then the sense of transport through the air, through black night, with an eternal wind blowing through one's very soul, a wind nothing could hide from. Then blackness.

Lisa screamed again.

Mick felt paralyzed. He was barely conscious. Could not move.

Ben was shouting obscenities and then his hoarse voice rose into a high, tortured scream.

Lisa screamed again, over and over, the desperate wail of someone lost and facing a horrendous fate. It was not a scream, more of a tormented wailing,

Rain drops, big ones, pong-ponged on the roof of the car. Mick remembered the dreary, rainy industrial parks back east where they'd lived, New Jersey, just slag dripping with rust in junkyards along rivers seething with hair and freezing rain. The kind of place one's shoulders soon hurt from so much shivering.

Lisa went on screaming like an animal in death panic.

Mick seemed to black out; when he came to, Ben and Lisa were gone. No, they were out on the muddy street, surrounded by shadowy figures. Men and women in overalls, their dirty hair plastered down from the rain...some wore baseball caps, others hard hats, a few goggles. They had Ben and Lisa on their knees in the road. They had ropes on Ben and Lisa, around their waists, their wrists, their necks, their ankles. Lisa's pretty white blouse with the yellow and red flowers was already soaked and muddy. Ben's plaid shirt had turned darker. Ben had stopped yelling now. He was on all fours, head hanging exhaustedly. He'd already given up the fight. The mob of men and women threw more ropes around him. They pushed and kicked him over onto his side. Lisa was still fighting. She was still screaming. On her hands and knees, alternately begging for mercy and then yelling curses.

Mick wanted to scream for them but could not.

Ben's car seemed to have stopped at an intersection, but it was hard to tell where the muddy plains left off and paved road began. The streets here looked slick and shiny. Tall buildings, towers, laceworks of iron and lights, loomed all around. The air had a faintly metallic tinge, and it wasn't really cold, although the rain never let up and every minute or two the city seemed to grab its breath and exhale a big sob or moan of gusting wind. Above on the freeway shoulder stood what looked like a huge crane, must have weighed a hundred tons, solid Krupp dog-mean with rivets. From its pulley wheel hung a chain, and at the end of the chain was a chrome ball about twenty feet in diameter. Several operators in slickers and wet helmets climbed on the crane doing whatever it took to make the gadget work. Mick began to realize it wasn't a wrecking ball, but a huge electromagnet—and they were using it to yank cars, what, from one universe into another? Was that how the marks came to be on the roads? One of the men looked directly down at Ben's car from about fifty feet up, talking into a telephone. Police cars silently cruised in: strange looking ones, with lights in all the right places but the shapes were wrong, wedges and cubes and spheres put together like a child's Bildo set. Even the colors were off: no shields, no words, just a pearly glow somewhere on the somber end of the spectrum, maybe fiery like topaz, or was that a helluva wax job? Mick was mesmerized.

The police cars slid to a stop and the cops got out. But what cops! They wore bulbous white helmets. They had smoky visors so one could not see their eyes. They all seemed to have uniformly wiry, tallish bodies covered in some uniform that looked like black tights and a short cloak. Each carried a futuristic looking gun with built in flashlight. The men and women in overalls went back up to their jobs at the freeway shoulder.

Several kicked and clubbed Ben while they handcuffed him. "Hey, that's my brother!" Mick mouthed, but no sound came out.

Lisa kept screaming, her beautiful voice now growing hoarse as it rose up in panic and subsided in fatigue, up in terror, down in fatigue, up in horrified death fear, down again beaten and tired. Several more cops forced her face-down in the mud while others handcuffed her. She became silent. She did not look back at Mick at all as they led her to a black van. Ben was already on the van, looking slumped and defeated.

There was a rap on the window. Two or three visors floated outside.

Mick, suddenly able to move, rolled the window down. "Hey! That's my brother and my fiancee!"

A wand touched his shoulder. An electrical current tingled him and then he was still.

"Identify yourself." Tiny red lights danced behind those visors. There were a half dozen of them, multiprocessing together. One could see thoughts whirling in one visor, fly to another, and keep whirling there while other thoughts took the place of the first.

"What is he doing here?" one said. It sounded as if he were talking in a tin can.

"There has been a mistake," another said.

"You should not be here," they said to Mick.

Mick had a dozen questions: where am I, who are you, what's happening, how do I leave? His life flashed before him. His paintings. Lisa. Oh Lisa! Em. Monica. His paintings. Just when it was all about to turn out well. He felt a pinch on his neck, caught sight of a rubbery black glove with the corner of his eye, and lost consciousness as a steel grip touched his carotid area.

Before they lifted him from Ben's car (a tow truck was already pulling up to take it away) he caught a last glimpse of the black van carrying Lisa and Ben away toward the horizon. There, in the rain, Mick thought he made out grimy brick buildings with oddly lit windows.

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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.