Winter Solstice

Ugh, well, it was eventful, to say the least. I rented a car and loaded it up with supplies and got out of town by late afternoon. It was pretty fun, at first, just like the roadtrip. I sang along to the radio, and Black stared out the window as the kilometers rolled by. The plan was to just keep moving the entire night, not staying in any one place, and I’d made sure to get lots of sleep beforehand and six packs of V ready. It was all set.

The radio got staticky after about an hour and a half, and steadily worsened as we went on. This wasn’t a red alert, since that always happens once you leave the footprint of the city and get into the mountains, but knowing the association put me on edge. I turned the radio off and plugged in my iPhone and started playing that.

As the sun dipped to the horizon, I flicked the lights on. Black, who had found a packet of crackers in the glove compartment and was steadily chewing his way through them, made an irritated noise. I told him if he wanted us to crash into a tree, we could.

I sort of regret saying that now. Because we did.

Not right then, of course. Right then, the iPhone’s music started getting snowy as well, and this time it wasn’t supposed to happen. A growing sense of unease began to pervade everything. I went a little faster, the driving equivalent of putting your collar up.

And all of a sudden, there it was, standing calmly in the middle of the road, picked out by the headlights. The iPhone screeched, and the brakes and tires joined in in a cacophonous duet. Thanking absolutely everything that my uncle had decided to give a lesson on bootlegger’s turns while I was practicing for my license, /the paddock he allotted for the training was pretty ripped up by the end of it), I turned around and rode the nope train to fuck that ville all the way to… wards him again. And this time he had his tentacles out.

There came that sinking feeling you get when you know there’s no way this is going to end well and that there’s no way to avoid it. I was determined to try, though. Gears grinded as the car was complainingly hauled into reverse, and I started backing away from him at high speed, eye fixed on him and ears straining for the noise of any oncoming traffic or the sound of the judderbars. I was as taut as a wire, and when Black chose this moment of all moments to shake my shoulder, I snapped at him.

“WHAT.” I said, and rear ended a road marker. Several road markers. I slammed on the brakes for the second time in as many minutes and glared at him.

After the wide eyed response to being practically firebreathed upon vanished, he pointed out the window. Slendy was gone from the road, but we were now in a forest. I craned my neck in all directions and nervously licked my lips.

“It’s okay, it’s, it’s okay. I know where we are. This is McLean’s Island.” The pine plantation is pretty distinctive. I locked the doors and windows. “Black, whatever you do, don’t get out of the car, and don’t let anything in.” I started yelling out into the darkness. “Ha! You want me to move? Well, I’m staying right here! How about that? Ha! I win! I… Black will you stop eating those crackers, you’re driving me nuts!” I snatched the packet from his hands. It was empty. The crunching noises continued.

I felt myself pale. Black just kept looking at the empty gap where the packet had been in his hands. I put it back and verrry slowly shifted into first.

Something heavy smacked onto the hood. I didn’t get a good look at it since my knee jerk response was to floor the accelerator and it rolled up and over the windscreen, leaving a trail of blood. I turned on the wipers, frantically switching gears, and that loud screeching noise was totally from the tires and absolutely not me.

Daughtry’s Renegade started playing in my head as I watched the speedometer’s needle climb higher and higher. I knew an approximation of the road layout, but that was useless if this was a Loop. I drove randomly, any direction was good as long as it was away. Black had dropped the cracker packet and was now hanging on for dear life to the point where he was leaving marks in the seat. As I rounded a corner at something approaching 80kph, he made an ‘I don’t like this’ noise. I told him to stuff it.

A bit of detail to make what happened next make sense; in McLean’s Island there is a part of the road where it goes up and then dips suddenly, enough that at normal speeds driving down it gives the stomach dropping sensation of being in an elevator. I wasn’t driving at normal speeds, and all four wheels left the ground. Everything went into the slow motion mode of imminent impact as we flew through the air, and then they connected with the road and lost grip. In less time than it took to react, the car had halted itself with a tree, and I had lived up to my icon. I blacked out.

When I woke up, my neck informed me that it had only recently healed and was going to hate me forever for doing this to it again. My chest and abdomen hurt where the seatbelt had cut into them, and my body was starting to get very jittery from adrenalin and caffeine. I groaned, coughed up a lung, and opened my eye. First thing I noticed was that Black was gone from the passenger seat. Second thing was that the windscreen was smashed, letting the cold, wet night air in. Third thing was the tree the entire front of the car had wrapped itself around. The headlights had gone out, and refused to come back on.

At first I thought he’d gone flying through the windscreen, and fought with the seatbelt while trying to see if there were any bodies out there. When I got free, I found his seatbelt hadn’t torn, it had been unclipped. I swore. I grabbed a torch from under the seat and climbed out through the gap where the windscreen had been, curling my lip at the blood still on the hood. The ‘not letting anything in’ policy had just gone down in terms of feasibility. I shouldn’t have brought him, I thought. Shouldn’t have. He would have been completely, well, mostly, safe back at home, as long as he didn’t try to open the windows. And now he’s in the forest, somewhere, probably in imminent danger of being eaten.

I started searching around and away from the car with the torchbeam, while still keeping one hand on the metal. “Black? Hellooooo! Are you out there! I know you don’t talk much, but make a noise!”

I think it’s understandable that when a hand reached out from under the car and grabbed my ankle I panicked. I kicked it free and then kicked under the car, to a cry of pain, before crouching and shining the torch under it, ready for anything.

It was Black, and his nose was now bleeding. I was immediately and profusely apologetic. His sleepwalking stare had now become a little more thousand yarded, and he wouldn’t get out from under the car for love nor money. In the end I performed the most awkwardly angled nose fixing with the first aid kit, and managed to persuade him to get a tarp between him and the ground. I tossed him the sleeping bag and the pillow, and then prepared for a long night of paranoia and no sleep.

It… was not fun. Every little noise had me on high alert, and I kept at least one part of me touching the car at all times as I patrolled around it, taser in hand. As the hours ticked by the numbers of scattered crushed green cans around the area rose and my head was constantly swiveling as I tried to account for my blind spot. I kept checking on Black in case he disappeared again. Every time I thought I began to relax a little, I spotted it, lurking in the background. I’d rarely felt so defenseless in my life. He could have killed us both then and there, if he got the whim, and I began to wonder why he hadn’t.

An hour before the sun rose was the last time I saw him. When I saw it rise it was like seeing it for the first time. I laughed. I was as tired as hell, but I was alive. Despite not being out of the woods yet, I felt like I’d passed some kind of trial.

I wrenched open one of the back doors and started rummaging. The screeching sound of the metal woke up Black; I heard the sound of his head thunking against the underside of the car. I retrieved what I’d wanted, and then slammed the door shut, whistling.

“Hey, Black!” I said chirpily. I bet my manic grin was the last thing he wanted to see this early. “Nonono, don’t go back to sleep, come on out. It’s gone.” For now, said the part of my mind that wasn’t currently euphoric. I ignored it, and pulled the tarp out from under the car, with him on it. I sat down on it, facing the sun, and opened the bottle of whiskey. Yes, yes, I know.

As I poured it into the cups he blearily sat up. We watched the sunrise turn everything gold. Everything was covered in dew, so it sparkled, and the air smelled of pine and petrichor.

“You know,” I said. “There’s so many places that celebrate the longest night of the year ending. I can see why. It’s a way of saying, ‘We’ve passed through the worst. We survived.’ That’s a great thing to celebrate. Being alive. And it’s still going to be cold and frosty for the next while, it’ll be hard, but now we know, we know that it won’t last forever, because the shortest day’s been. Time to honor the dead! Time to celebrate the living!”

I leaned back against the car and sighed. I wanted to sleep, very badly, but I couldn’t just yet. “So then, here’s to being alive!” I passed him his drink and gulped down mine. “Here’s to passing trials!” I threw the cup at a tree. Given a growing dislike of forests, I found it hard to care about littering them.

Black copied me in gulping down the drink and then started coughing and spluttering. After a few slaps on the back he was fine, but when I poured a second drink and put it in front of him, he ignored it. I smiled, and drank them both, looking up at the now blue sky. Everything was perfect.

That’s when I remembered where I was and how I’d got there.