Fiction: Replicas

By Chris Brownsword

Between rides, I slept in roadside ditches and awoke surrounded by the shrapnel of exploded dreams. 

 

One motorist asked whether traveling alone scared me. I told him everything scared me. He asked what I’d do if I stirred in the middle of the night and felt movement at the bottom of my sleeping bag. I told him I’d prefer not to think about it. ‘‘You’re disturbed from your slumber, and feel motion around your feet,’’ he said. ‘‘You hope it’s only your imagination. But then this - there’s no human word for it - thing slithers up your body.’’

 

Later, the motorist talked about millennia-old colonies built around underground reservoirs whose inhabitants nourished themselves on reptiles. He offered me ten euros to put both of my socks on one hand then move said hand in and out of his mouth while he masturbated. When I turned him down, he became aggressive, so I picked up a screwdriver from the floor and pushed it against his jugular and told him I’d keep pushing until he stopped the car. He seemed to like that, too. 

 

Later still, a Moldavian trucker spoke about corpses left by the roadside. Bodies missing eyes and tongues, or else intact, but dead all the same, and whose ghosts wandered the highways. ‘‘Shafts of light pour through their emaciated torsos,’’ the Moldavian told me. ‘‘Pollen froths in their wounds.’’ He reached for a cigarette off the dashboard, where it lay among coffee containers and packets of condoms and loose pills. ‘‘They warn against the approaching age of the Beast.’’

 

‘‘Uh, yeah, okay,’’ I said, wondering if I’d be able to survive jumping from a moving truck should another sock-on-hand-sex-act-request follow this preamble. ‘‘Age of the Beast. Sounds creepy.’’

 

‘‘Better pray real hard you never hear the Beast calling out to you,’’ said the Moldavian, speaking with careful determination, like he was attempting to winch each word from off a burning rooftop.

 

‘‘I’ll do that.’’

 

‘‘Pray night and day, because it’s out there, and it’s hungry, and even as we speak, it’s getting closer.’’

 

‘‘Yeah, sure,’’ scanning the floor for a screwdriver or anything similar, ‘‘I get what you’re saying.’’  

 

The Moldavian lit his cigarette. ‘‘This is what I’m saying. When the age of the Beast is finally upon us, humankind will be scribbled out like the name of a disruptive tenant in a landlord’s address book. A tenant whose dogs the neighbors complain of howling all night, though he lives alone.’’ 

 

‘‘Reminds me of a movie called Flesh-Shredding Coven. Have you seen that one? It’s about a murderous cult trying to raise a demonic entity from its ancient slumber under a deconsecrated church.’’

 

‘‘This isn’t a movie,’’ the Moldavian filling the cab with smoke. ‘‘The age fast approaches, and already the Beast roams free.’’

 

A few miles down the way, the Moldavian pulled over on a busy stretch of road for a piss-break. The sun had drawn shadows out of everything and heated them to the point where they began to crackle. As I stood watering a patch of dying grass, the world vibrated in trails of scorched engine oil. Here and there, random articles of clothing lay discarded like rejects from a jumble sale. Meanwhile, a palisade of trees - acacias, I’ll have to guess - demarcated the horizon. They looked like huge toadstools, or men and women carrying baskets on their heads. Vaguely comical. Though in my exhaustion I perceived them as a portent. A deterrent or mockery. Next moment, the scene rearranged itself and the trees seemed instead to have gathered for some kind of ritual, declaring the presence of a creature too well camouflaged for eyes to detect, and too horrifying for mind to comprehend were indeed eyes to see. 

 

An illusion created by the heat, I told myself. Yet on a deeper level, hidden from me for my own protection, I knew it was there without knowing what it was. I heard it bidding me nearer. I heard the ferocious snapping of its jaws.

 

*

 

The Moldavian let me out near Valencia, at a highway rest area enclosed within marshland and comprised of public toilets, a strip club and a motel with rooms laid out in a U-shape around a courtyard. 

 

Exercising my cramped muscles, I hobbled by the motel under whose sign a trucker wearing a baseball cap stood watching me. ‘‘Buenas noches,’’ I said, but got no response out of him.

 

Every few steps, I paused to massage my legs. Second or third time, the moonlight picked out an undefined glob near the strip club. Concentrating, I brought two figures into focus: a man on his feet and a woman kneeling in front of him. Before I could tiptoe away unnoticed, the man shouted in my direction. Jeans and underwear pooled around ankles, he proceeded to shuffle and hop towards me. He wore a green condom which glowed like nebulae. 

 

Although the woman called him back, the man paid no heed. Just yelled, as if his was the wrath of some totemic effigy become flesh. 

 

Muscles still too cramped to run, I had little choice but to stand my ground. Placate him or endure a beating. Rather than take another step towards me, however, the man raised his hands above his head to indicate submission, then waddled back to the woman. Naturally, I’d played no part in his retreat. Next to me stood the trucker in the baseball cap. He’d armed himself with a samurai sword.

 

*

 

Lobo swilled down black market Ritalin with coffee and sang along to a tape of rancheros. He smiled at me as if he assumed I knew the words, and I smiled back as if I did. It seemed rude to admit that Valencia had actually been my destination. Cowardly that I’d jumped in his truck only because I was too scared to stay at the rest area. Scared I’d be robbed or raped or murdered. The samurai sword, by the way, was a plastic replica Lobo told me he kept behind the driver’s seat ‘for the bad times.’

 

Lobo dropped me off on the outskirts of Barcelona. A woman wearing a bikini and high-heels stood waiting to take my place. She shut the door behind her while Lobo drew a beach towel across the windscreen, and that was the last I saw of him.

 

Sunbeams hacked into my skin and then scissored their way back out again. Through heat shimmers and dust, I wandered among derelict industrial units to some dumpsters, then sheltered in the shade. Prostitutes occupied those doorways left standing, while parked opposite was a convoy of trucks - the shadows of the rigs nearest me throwing Halloween shapes on the dumpsters and over the faces of the women, as if to disguise them or render them monstrous. All the trucks had a number plate in the window inscribed with the driver’s nickname, as well as a national flag or football scarf to advertise each country of origin. Lobo’s only displayed a standard company logo, but some of these others were customised with graffiti and flashing lights. They resembled a futuristic race of nomads come together for the night to share the songs of their kin.

 

Tapping a beer can against a bronzed thigh polka-dotted with bruises the size of fingerprints, one of the prostitutes stepped in front of me. In English, she asked, ‘‘What you looking for, baby doll?’’

 

‘‘I’m not looking for anything,’’ I told her.

 

‘‘You know that famous saying people say,’’ the woman said, revealing a mouth with fewer teeth than my own, her face peeling away with sunburn, ‘‘everybody comes here looking for their thing.’’

 

‘‘I don’t know that one. I’m just enjoying the shade.’’

 

‘‘I hear you, baby doll. The sun has been eating my brain all morning.’’ 

 

‘‘Not too bad right now, though,’’ I said. ‘‘In the shade, I mean.’’

 

‘‘The shade is good. The shade is nice. You and me, we could have so much fun in the shade.’’

 

‘‘Oh, well, yeah, I’m sure we could. But all the same, I’ll pass.’’

 

The woman altered her posture, her frame creaking as she leaned towards me, like a scarecrow brought to life on a vanishing plain. ‘‘What’s the matter, baby doll? You don’t like what you see? Think you’re someone better? Like you’re high up almighty in the sky above me, is that it?’’

 

‘‘Just enjoying the shade,’’ I said again, distracted by a flash of chrome from a truck, and off to the side two men brawling while others stood around watching. The first man punching the second man in his stomach and the second man taking a step back and dropping to the floor and then a knife in the hand of the first man and blood running from the stomach of the second man but nobody reacting; and I wondered if, like everything else in the world, the knife and blood were just tricks of the light, but not magic tricks, or if so, ones with trapdoors that all led into the same dank pit.

 

‘‘Ofrenda. Mucho sangre,’’ the woman said, blowing smoke from a cigarette out of what remained of her nostrils. She chugged her beer and then squeezed my arm. ‘‘Nice. Do you work out?’’

 

‘‘Yeah, funny.’’

 

‘‘Don’t cry. I like skinny. Some of these truckers, they don’t take care of themselves.’’ She squinted up at me as if the sun was in her eyes, though it loomed behind her. ‘‘So, are we getting it on?’’

 

I could think of few things more dismal than coupling on this street. Though that’s not strictly true, because if I’d thought some more, or even without thinking, I could have come up with fifty other scenarios that beat this one in terms of sheer dismalness. ‘‘I’ll be gone in a minute or two,’’ I said. 

 

‘‘A minute or two is all we need,’’ the woman said.

 

‘‘Well, yeah, I’m sure you’re right. But, uh, really, no thanks.’’

 

‘‘Really, no thanks,’’ the woman ridiculing me while staring at the tip of her expired cigarette. She flicked the spark wheel of her lighter. No flame. Flicked again. Same result. ‘‘Got a light, baby doll?’’

 

‘‘I don’t smoke.’’

 

The woman dropped her beer can to the floor, then muttered something which didn’t sound Spanish, or which might have been a hex cast backwards (the worse kind, perhaps), before returning to where the other prostitutes stood. One of them handed an object to her, which she then pointed at me. 

 

Even here in the shade, the heat of the pavement was so great I could feel it scratching my toes through my trainers. But as I brought the object into focus, the barrel and muzzle and so forth, I found myself frozen to the spot. Time didn’t stop or slow down. I know this because I counted exactly five seconds. One, two, three, four...on the five-count, I relaxed. The woman was smiling. She’s toying with me, I told myself, the gun probably isn’t even loaded. It was then that she pulled the trigger. 

 

People talk about moments when their heart leaped into their mouth. Did you spit it out, I always mean to ask, or choke it back down? I registered the muzzle-flash but felt no impact from the bullet. Waited for blood to geyser out, but none came. Nor pain. I assumed adrenaline had dulled my senses, preparing me for death, though I lacked the courage to undertake an examination of the entry wound and pronounce its severity. As for my assassin, she just stood there laughing. Then, still laughing, she turned the gun on herself. 

 

I watched her face light up with the second muzzle-flash, but none of her features appeared damaged. Had the weapon misfired, blowing off her fingers instead? I sniffed the air for traces of cordite, but the atmosphere held only heat and exhaust fumes. 

 

The woman handed the gun back to her friend. Of course, I said to myself. Puffing on her cigarette, the woman laughed again. Or else she hadn’t stopped laughing. Except now she laughed smoke. Of course. A novelty lighter. A replica. Like Lobo’s samurai sword. 

 

As I began to walk away, the woman yelled something after me. I couldn’t make out any of the words over the din of engines, though by her tone I could tell she wasn’t wishing me safe passage.

Chris Brownsword was born in Sheffield, England. He recently completed a novel entitled Paradise Limited - imagine a cross between Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson and Roberto Bolano’s Savage Detectives, then drastically lower your expectations. He avoids social media.