A couple of days ago, around midnight, we were driving down a backroad in the middle of nowhere. Natalie was at the wheel, I was in the passenger's seat and Peter was in the back, having a rest. Then, suddenly, something's wrong, I can feel it in the air and Peter and Natalie start clutching their heads and screaming. I just manage to grab the wheel and stop us dying horrible in a blazing fireball, though we still went skidding right off the road.
Before I can even start asking what happened, there's this huge roar, like a foghorn or a siren or something. I'd nearly have thought it was a truck but there were none around; we were completely alone. When the sound passes, Peter and Natalie are in right back into action. All of a sudden, I'm having a shotgun pressed into my hands. When Natalie put that cold steel in my hands, I shivered.
"I don't kill. I can't. I won't."
She looked at me with a look of what I can only call solemn exasperation.
"They don't know that."
We climbed out of the jeep. No sense in just waiting for the monster or one of its minions to attack. Peter and Natalie showed me where to stand and told me how to shoot the gun. I was shitting myself. Even Peter looked more relaxed than me, holding a revolver in his one hand, while Natalie branded some sort of high-power rifle. They were obviously more prepared to kill than I, but that didn't help Peter when someone grabbed him and started dragging him into the darkness. Whoever it was covered his mouth and a few minutes passed before Natalie and I even noticed he was gone. Turns out that pitch blackness isn't conducive to a good strategic position.
When we did notice, we followed the trail that Peter had left in the ground as he struggled. How didn't we hear him dragging his heels through the ground? Were we really so scared that we couldn't even hear something that obvious?
At the end of the trail, we found Peter bound tightly to a tree, but he didn't respond when we asked if he was okay. I used the faint light of my iPod to check and found that he was unconscious with, bizarrely, the word "Juliet" written on his forehead. It took Natalie and I a couple of minutes to cut through the ropes and even longer to get Peter back to the car. When we did, something was waiting for us, sprayed on the back window;
"ALACK, THERE'S MORE ARROGANCE IN THINE EYE THAN TWENTY OF THEIR SWORDS
Fblb khnm fx fnc hpdik lixmw wxqy?"
just so we're clear. Wasn't me.
ReplyDelete