“Get away from me you filthy, mind-sucking, swine…” Dear god, I thought, the brute had lost it, he’d taken one final step too far and had fallen over the edge. White foam was at the corners of his mouth and his eyes burned with something that was so raw that it could not be defined as any emotion we mere mortals had ever experienced or even dreamt of during the longest of nights. I could see a vein pulsing frantically on his forehead, seemingly in the last creaking throws of a doomed struggle to retain the man’s raging humours. I looked for something heavy to put him down for long enough for the wave to break, yet all the while I made sure I did not break contact with those terrifying eyes.

 

 “Damn it man, question your perception… I’m here to help and I’m the only chance you’ve got… If you take me down in a few hours you’ll either be dead or face down on a prison cell with a dozen knees in your back and clubs raining down on your head…” I knew I had to speak to both sides at once, that I had to shut him down, sweetness would not help, he’d entered a state where such words were anathema, I had to bring the fear up gently until his mind gave into despair. My eyes alighted on a quart bottle of rotgut Mexican whisky that had come into my possession some days earlier. Something was dead at the bottom of the bottle, it looked like some hateful breed of spider or scorpion, possibly both, the thing too vague and hideous to bear close examination without it burning itself forever into the observer’s dreams. We had sworn to save it until we were either desperate or felt that nothing would take us further, inking out vague and implausible contracts in the oil that dripped from beneath the busted Ford, scrawling strange runes on a filthy blanket that promised to not hold the other legally responsible for any horrors that resulted from that evil night.

 

 The lying scheister who had sold it to me in a dark alleyway at three am had claimed it to be some weird mix of mescal infused with extracted mescaline, yet I knew I had been burned the moment he had begun laughing maniacally and had turned to run into the night. I had struck him hard across the back of the legs with the nine-iron I’d brought along for protection and that had passed for a cane in the poor light. I knew that he’d never spot it, such people fear the light, their eyes have been replaced with grey orbs that suck in the darkness, they reach out with their other senses to feed off the creatures that are unlucky enough to stumble within range, and when daylight comes they become transparent, crawling away to wait for the dark to return, materialising slowly as the dusk-light deepens. The blow from the nine-iron had merely made him laugh louder, the guffaws becoming a high pitched wail that trembled my guts and knocked me to my knees, and I feared for a moment that he would turn and lean forward, placing his hands on my forehead and drawing my soul out through sweat and filth-caked pores. Only my companion running up silently, a great ball of burning newspapers raised high above his head, trailing flame like some satanic comet, had scared the creature off, and we had stood alone and shaken in that dark alleyway. I knew I owed him my life and so I had let him drive for the first time in his life.

 

 He’d taken to it surprisingly well, the automatic requiring little co-ordination beyond pinning the pedal to the floor and steering a course that he swore blind was being dictated to him by his dark god. To question this would be to question powers beyond my comprehension and so I had nodded as he’d closed his eyes and his head had lolled back, strange groans coming from him as he steered with his knees and wove patterns in the air with two of the giant flares I had brought along in case the darkness proved too much for our minds. I had stood in the back seat of the convertible, using a third to ignite great trails of petrol that I poured from the gas can so that we, and those who came after us, would know where we had been and not to go back there for we had already harvested whatever energy lay there. Every so often the car’s dying fuel tank would cough up a few pints of its blood and that too would ignite, the fire pursuing us, the gasoline destroying itself in a desperate effort to destroy us.

 As the first hint of dawn had begun to turn the dark clouds a sickly nicotine shade my companion had slammed on the brakes, popped the bonnet, stepped from the car, and announced that he had been told we had arrived. With a nod I stepped from the car and had lit one of the few remaining cigarettes, the thing tasted of petrol and nearly overpowering me until I willed my body to adapt, to need the precious fuel. My companion had begun reaching into the deep pockets of his coat, the one that held so many mysteries within its dark flapping folds and that had hung on him since I had known him. The more I looked, the more I began to realise that it was not a coat, but a thick special skin that only people like him grew, inspired by some mighty karmic imbalance in the womb, his forming body realising that creatures like he needed special protection if they were to venture among us. It had been pierced in many places over the year... in fact I had pierced it myself on one occasion, when he had pleaded for me to help his soul breath before it suffocated… and now there was no sign of that wound, no scar, no stitches, his body so attuned to healing mortal wounds that it shrugged off any mere pinprick I or any of my kind could inflict.

 

 “Share damn you, my coat burned away and took all with it…” I begged him and yet all I received was a grin that made me take a step back and reach for where I had secreted the nine-iron in case of just such an occasion. It was gone… my mind worked hurriedly back and remembered that it was now travelling at speed in the opposite direction, embedded deep in the side of some monstrous behemoth of a truck that had brushed so close that I could have kissed it’s pockmarked exterior. I had undone myself, I knew that now. He continued to grin silently at me, his fingers beginning to stretch, his hunched shoulders unclenching for the first time, revealing the true terrifying scale of the thing I had mistaken for a companion, for a fellow wanderer. He’d said he’d played basketball and at the time I had laughed, the shambling figure stooped so low as to drag his knuckles along the floor seeming forever earthbound. I had dismissed it in much the same way as others had dismissed my claims to have narrowly missed a place on the PGA tour. Yet I had known I was lying, I had just needed an excuse to carry around the brute of a nine-iron, it’s shaft reinforced to the point where I could, if in possession of the strength, drive it’s head six inches into the surface of a tarmac road with a mighty downward swing and the shaft would not even flex, let alone bend. It was then he declared his intention to offer me as a sacrifice… something I normally would have laughed away but this time he was speaking to whatever the hell he could see beside him and whatever it was, when he looked at it, caused an expression of fear and horror to ripple across his face.

 

 “I am impure damn you… I have whored my way across this planet… I am diseased and filthy…” I protested, backing away as he began to advance. My fingers slipped around the neck of the bottle, the creature inside rolling around, disintegrating until the liquor was a thick sludge. As he lunged for me I brought it up, feeling his fingers close around my throat at the same time as I felt the welcoming jarring of my wrist and heard the solid thud of his brain reverberating within his skull. He dropped to the ground in a tangle of writhing limbs before becoming still. I hit him once more just to make sure the message had been passed on and then dragged him to the car. After strapping him to the bonnet with the belts I usually reserved for attaching the elk I always took pleasure in mowing down I slammed my foot to the floor and hurtled in a direction I assumed to contain civilization. I felt as much a sense of pride in my trophy as any of those moronic elk, even though it takes a great deal of skill to take those swine down, hit them wrong and they’ll roll right up over your bonnet and take your head clean off. Winters where I grew up always saw many cars halfway across the road, engines idling, decapitated drivers still clutching cigarettes, the plaintiff wails of the broken elk filling the woods. As I hit eighty I heard the first groans of my trophy as he regained consciousness, I hunched down low to make myself more aerodynamic and give the son of a bitch every extra mile per hour I could wring from the car.

 

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