Anniversary

I exhale, trying to open my eyelids. Lifting them feels like trying to lift an entire mountain. Everywhere hurts. Eventually, I pry them open with my shaky fingers. It is strangely warm, and the heat sticks to my body like glue. My nose runs with blood and snot. I roll over and flop around gently like a dying fish, trying to pull myself up. I can’t feel my legs. I thump and hit them mercilessly, but it feels like they’re not even there.

I’m on a road somewhere. I don’t know where, and I don’t know why or how. Even through my blurred vision, I can sense danger somehow. The road is seemingly quite narrow, with little pieces of gravel that press into the bloodied skin on my arms. The ground beneath me feels somewhat living; it has an undeniable, unnatural warmth to it that passes through my body, making me squirm a little. There is no wind or breeze to soothe my slowly roasting body, the air oven-like in its temperature.

If I squint, I can make out steep, rounded hills lurking miles away, blanketed by fog. The landscape is mostly flat and grassy, stretching on for as far as I can see. No animals, no people. Just silence and the taste of copper. My lips are dry and swollen, but my tongue feels like a slug in my mouth and only slides aimlessly around my teeth when I try to move it. I try screaming for help, but all that comes out is a quiet, garbled whimper.

Around an hour passes. My vision fades in and out, and blood slides down my throat only to come gargling back up again. Its taste is putrid and sour, like acid. Rather than my energy slowly returning to me as I hoped it would, instead I feel as if I am burning out. One singular memory suddenly clears up in my mind. It is my 65th anniversary today. I have no idea what for.

My hopes are surged as I hear the wheeze of a car engine coming down the road. A few seconds later, it rolls out of the fog. A navy-blue Packard Clipper, its headlights beaming down at me like the light of God himself. It comes to an abrupt stop around a few feet away, and I can see the driver, a middle-aged man, peering down at me, checking if he’s hallucinating. I beg for help with my eyes, and he steps out of the car, rushing over to my broken body.

The man kneels at my shattered hip, his hands shaking nervously like a patient with Parkinson’s. Panic flashes in his eyes and his face is red and conflicted. His clothes are like mine, albeit a lot less bloody. Suspenders and a buttoned shirt. Like a L.A. detective. He pauses and glances around the landscape, then back at the driver’s seat, and even in my condition, I can tell what he’s thinking. I moan in pain, both of us unable to speak in the moment.

After what feels like a few months, the man mumbles something unintelligible, places his hand under my armpits and lifts my upper body upwards a foot or so, dragging me to the car door. The car is packed full of miscellaneous junk, piling up to the ceiling in some places, with the seats mostly occupied and no leg room to speak of. He crams me into an empty space in the back and jumps into the driver’s seat, almost slamming the car door on his foot in haste.

The car’s engine coughs itself into life under the turn of the man’s key in his hand, and the tires scrape down against the gravel. I shrink down aimlessly in my seat, trying to hide from the blinding pain. The man often darts his eyes back to my squirming body as he U-turns back down the road, fishing out a map and a bottle of alcohol from the glove box. He rapidly unfolds the map and begins to trace a pathway with his finger. The bottle of alcohol is placed in my lap, and although I imagine the man wants me to pour it on my wounds, I crack open the top and take a powerful swig, struggling to stay conscious.

I reach over to a pocket from one of the car’s junk piles. A handful of dirty tissues. Now bloody, dirty tissues. Neither of us have said anything to each other until the man finally decides to speak up:

“P-put pressure on the wound.” He mumbles. I almost don’t hear him. He speaks with a heavy foreign accent, though I can’t place where from. Somewhere like Germany or Russia.

More hopeless minutes pass. I keep a hand firmly planted on my left hip, fingers pushing deep into the opening of my wound. The window roller handle jiggles gently in my grasp, as I am unable to find the strength to pull it around. Not like it would make much of a difference, I suppose. The man seems lost; he worryingly gazes at the map every few seconds, squinting and cursing under his breath. I see the symbol of a hospital at the end of his finger. The road stretches on perfectly straight for what seems like miles. It doesn’t look like we’re getting anywhere at all. Fog is still smeared all along the hills far away, in thick clumps.

Half-dried blood is stained on my teeth. My head bobs back and forth. It feels like I have an anvil at the end of my neck. I try to spit into my tissues but miss and dribble the saliva down my chin. Trying to stay awake, I periodically pinch my hip, making my eyes twitch and flutter like leaves in the breeze.

“What were you doing out here?” I groggily ask the man.

“Hmm?” He replies.

“You seem lost, but this road is just one straight line. Which way did you come from? How did you even get here in the first place?”

The man pauses, a 1000-yard stare caught in his eye. He seems paralysed in confusion and dread, unable to give me an answer. I begin to wish I’d never have asked the question, as the man’s lip quivers and he looks on the verge of tears. It takes a while for him to fully close his mouth again.

More time passes, and something undeniably feels very wrong. I catch occasional glimpses of movements in the fog. At first, just small glimmers of light that fade within an instant. But the further we seem to ‘travel’ the worse they seem to get. I can tell the man sees them too, he is just pretending he doesn’t. His face is still bright red. His bloodshot eyes stay bolted to the windshield, and his hands still rest on the steering wheel, holding it tightly in place.

The map slips from the man’s lap. I look at it a little and it confirms my suspicions. It makes no geological sense. There are no roads that straight, that long where we are supposed to be.

“Have you tried the radio?” I blurt out.

“No,” The man replies. “No, I have not.”

With a shaky hand, he presses the larger button to his left. There is a small crackle, and for a moment, it seems to flick into life. The spark of joy in our hearts is crushed, however, as a blanketing buzz of static drowns out anything being said. Frowning, the man turns the radio off, replacing the buzz with depressing silence and the light hum of the car engine.

My body feels warm and heavy, yet I cannot sleep. It feels like I should have bled out by now, but still, blood trickles onto the seats from my injury, like a steady river. The pain feels as strong as it was when I woke up, maybe worse. My hair is drooping to my shoulders, dusting my arms with dandruff.

The fog movements are increasing in frequency. They’re impossible to ignore now. Worse, the fog seems to be closing in on us. It’s approaching from behind as well as from the sides, little by little, making the car feel even more claustrophobic. The man is now uttering a continuous string of profanities in his native language, getting more and more tense as the minutes pass by and the fog gets closer.

Closer.

Closer still.

Just a few more feet from where it was five minutes ago.

The man’s fingers begin to twitch. He is unstable; the car seems to jerk from one direction to the other now and then. I fear for his sanity. He probably fears for his life.

Within the hour, the fog is mere inches away from the road. Breathing heavily, the man eases slowly off the accelerator, letting the car roll to a stop. He gently moves his hands away from the wheel. I raise an eyebrow while the man’s face freezes in sheer terror.

“Why have we-”

“Shh-shh-shh!” He interrupts, placing a finger to his lips.

“Why have we stopped?” I continue, in a much quieter tone.

“Y-you don’t see it?” He whispers. “Right in that…fucking spot over there.” The man jabs a stiff finger at a spot of fog just ahead of the car on our left. I lean in for a closer look, not being able to make anything out.

“I…I just saw it. Some sort of massive fucking…thing. Three times the height of this car, easily.

For what feels like days, we stare at the fog, waiting, anticipating for anything to show up. Neither of us dare to look away, or blink much. I am suspicious of the man’s growing paranoia.

"We're going to die out here." He speaks, his hand sliding down the side of his face.

"I won't get into heaven. Believe me, I'm not a good person. I did some bad things back in the war. Things that would make you sick at the sight of me. Things that make me sick at the sight of me. We tortured prisoners. We took them away. What about you?"

He turns and stares worriedly into my eyes. I stutter, struggling to form an answer. I know the answer myself, but I struggle to get it on my tongue.

"I...I ran over a little girl in the countryside. Never told anyone. I was drunk, I think. I was speeding. I just...left her there. She...oh, God, she might not have..."

I shiver, and the man turns back to face the wheel.

"Maybe we'll see each other in hell."

More silence passes.

“Back it up.” I finally speak.

“What?”

“Back it up. If there’s something there, we’ll go the other way. Better than just sitting here, waiting to get eaten or some shit.”

Eventually, the man nods and places a sweaty palm on the gear shift. For a moment, time seems to hang still. Nothing moves, not even the fog outside.

An unholy screech ripples through my eardrums as the car begins to reverse. I clamp my hands to my head, my screams unheard by even myself. Instinctively, I fall to the car’s floor, only managing to peek a glimpse of the horrible apparition as it steps out of the fog on its bony, jagged feet and claws its twisted body towards the car. The man spins the wheel hard, pressing his foot down as quickly as he can all while the monster wails. It stomps after us, kicking up gravel into the windows and making the ground tremble. My ears won’t stop ringing, even when the screaming stops and the man’s terrified spew of cusses fill the car again. We both take a breath of relief. All is safe again.

For around 30 seconds.

The same bony foot appears before us on the road, too wide for us to avoid. The car almost swerves straight into the fog, but instead flips upside down at the impact. For a beautifully scary moment, we are soaring through the air, me and the man both knocked out of our seats. We float above the road, our mouths agape, before inevitably coming crashing down again. Windows shatter, debris scatters across the ground. The man grunts in pain; a large glass shard is wedged in his shoulder-blade. A tire comes loose and rolls into the fog, never to be seen again. The steering wheel is lay flat on the ground outside. I am relatively unharmed, my previous injuries only slightly worsened.

The creature lets out a victorious yell, violating my ears once again. I moan and crawl out of the wreckage, finally getting a half-decent look at what the being is. A pale humanoid figure, except two to three stories tall and with bones poking out from its tightly wrapped skin, barely hanging on to the flesh. Its face consists of a single dark hole, where the awful noise emits from.

I press myself firmly into the gravel, taking shallow breaths. The monstrous thing reaches down with an elongated finger and scrapes the ruined Clipper into its palm. The man’s helpless screams still echo inside the vehicle as the monster carries him away with the car, disappearing once again into the fog.

Broken in both body and spirit, I lay down and wait for death, but it doesn’t come. I am still unable to feel my legs. Within a moment, the broken car parts are missing, and the road is clear once again. An overwhelming feeling of déjà vu prods at my mind. Another memory is brought to my attention within my brain without warning. Today’s date. 17th of September, 2019.

Finally, it all clicks.

I died 65 years ago today.

My hopes are surged once more as I hear the wheeze of a car engine coming down the road. A few seconds later, it rolls out of the fog. A navy-blue Packard Clipper, its headlights beaming down at me like the light of God himself.