Black Static #74 (March-April 2020) by TTA Press

Author:TTA Press [TTA Press]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: New Horror Fiction and Film
Publisher: TTA Press
Published: 2020-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

***

On the edge of town, the engine died for the second time. With the momentum of the hill Marie eased the vehicle to a stop at the side of the road. Twenty miles, she thought, with a small laugh of despair. It could not have been three.

She looked at the plastic can in the passenger seat. She thought of that woman in the fog lights. She thought of the dogleg bend of the lane. Had she recognised the driver when she had appeared then, so suddenly, shocking her backwards, when she had returned from the boot with the can?

She got out of the car and took the plastic can and locked the car and walked.

She thought of rent metal, of spilt petrol igniting.

On the forecourt of a BP station she sniffed the can on a whim and stopped. It didn’t smell of anything: stagnant water, maybe some dead leaves in the bottom of it. She thought of that woman in the darkness, a silhouette against fog lights. She tilted the can and put her finger to the remaining liquid as it spilt onto the floor, lifted her finger to her nose and sniffed. Water. She sniffed the can again. Licked the liquid from her fingers. Water. Then, tasting copper, she noticed the blood, remembered the thorn, if it had been a thorn, as she had trailed a hand along the hedgerow in the dark.

When she looked up, the automatic doors of the station had opened before her. The lights of the shop might have been a vision of an alien world. They dazzled her. She closed her eyes and began to hold her breath. She waited. She exhaled slowly through her teeth. Then she went into the shop, where electric chillers hummed like pylons in the empty night, to request some measure of fuel in an empty can, a kindness, a small mercy, a little help. Then she would drive back and park up by one of the pumps and fill the tank to the brim and pay. Something. It was a plan. It was better than nothing.

By the time she left the station it had started to rain.

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