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car violence, dragging, and implied dismemberment
This Everyday Anxiety contains
The bus rounds the corner at the same time he does.
He swears, hiking his satchel up by his waist and lengthening his strides into a full-paced run. The tight leather of his work shoes pinches uncomfortably at the increased pace and pressure compared to his leisurely stroll, but he’d known this was a risk when he’d stayed back.
He just really doesn’t want to come in early tomorrow.
And he also doesn’t want to wait twenty minutes for the next bus. Mercifully the driver sees him as it glides past and trundles to a stop, doors open, patiently waiting. He doesn’t let up his pace, nodding a breathless thanks as he hops the small step and tags his pass.
His usual spot is free, and he trudges up the back of the bus to slump down in it, permitting himself a relieved sigh as he drapes himself over a two-seater, briefcase on the bench next to him. His foot pangs again and relaxed muscles protest when he leans down to rub at it.
All the other seats are empty, actually. He supposes this isn’t too surprising. His preferred bus is a short route using backstreets instead of one of the main connecting services, and he’s well outside the normal rush hour peak. The swerve of the vehicle around the corner is unexpected though, and he sways a little, hastily pulling himself back into upright and away from his shoes.
With the relentless, flattening grey of the freshly set sun around him starting to verge on real night it’s difficult to tell, but he’s pretty sure they just took a wrong turn. Or is it a detour? There’d been a lot of roadworks this morning, it was difficult to tell. He could always ask, make sure the driver knows the route, or—
Goddamnit. There’s another bus, the route one number off, that comes on the alternating ten minute mark to his. His is every twenty minutes on the hour, the other one’s every twenty minutes from ten past.
A quick check of his smartwatch confirms it; it’s 6:34PM. His bus wasn’t even due at the stop for another ten minutes at the time he’d been running.
Fuck. Just what he needed. He reaches his hand for the bell, then hesitates. He’s pretty sure this route goes through another intersection with a stop for bunch of buses travelling to a station near his normal route, which—he’s already far enough from his stop that walking back would be a pain, and the driver had waited for him.
Mind made up he lowers his hand and squints out the window, waiting for a convenient place to jump off.
It’s funny how different the city can look when you go just a few blocks in a direction you don’t usually travel. It takes longer than he expects for a likely enough looking intersection to come up, and he dings the bell immediately upon seeing it. The driver pulls over graciously at a stop near the traffic lights, and he thanks them carelessly, as though this had been his intention all along, before stepping off and adjusting his case and tie while the bus departs, so that he isn’t immediately and obviously checking the stop for correct route information.
It’s deathly quiet in the early evening air, the late tinges of purple and indigo staining the skyline around him. There’s no other traffic on the road, and the lights silently switch to red over his head with no cars to halt there. He considers the stop: it’s a single pole with a hand signal reminder and a long ID number, but no visible route information, and he sighs.
The bus website he loaded on his smart watch is down, and the maps app on his phone stalled out at his usual bus stop a couple of blocks away from his job. He really hates smart technology sometimes.
There’s no sign of any traffic coming whatsoever, much less another bus, so he checks both ways perfunctorily and crosses the road. If he starts walking back the way he came he’ll either find a stop with more information, another bus route, or eventually wind up back in familiar territory.
He hears the car coming before he sees it—an impossibly sudden snarl of an engine buzzing up on him at speed.
The headlights are high and glowing red, a pointed and arched hood coming down to its illegally low fender. He sprints forward away from the noise, stumbling for a curb that seems much further away than it did a moment ago.
The car buzzes him as it flies past, knocking him down and making him drop his briefcase. Its engine snarls into the distance, fading like an angry wasp, and he stares up at the sky for a moment before picking himself up and collecting his case. One of the locks looks very broken and he sighs, brushing his pants off before walking towards the curb again. Or he would have if he wasn’t stopped in his tracks by something impossible.
It moved.
The road was three lanes in either direction, and he’s crossed four already, but there’s still three in between him and the other side of the street. He turns, puzzled, trying to figure out if in his rush to dodge the speeder he’s gone backwards but no—there are four lanes between him and the stop he’s come from.
He shakes his head and starts walking again. He’d clearly just misjudged.
Except when he crosses into the next lane his sight shimmers, and there are five behind him and still three in front. He stops, turning and running back towards the way he’d come, but it’s like whatever is doing it has anticipated this—and more and more lanes slot between him and the bus stop.
The horrible snarling engine noise returns with a vengeance, sounding like the baying of dogs, and then—from the direction he’d seen it drive off in—comes three of those terrible cars, gunning in his direction, blinding him with their red LED headlights. He drops the case and runs, hoping to get past at least the middle car, and maybe squeeze in the gap between two of them.
The sound of dogs barking and howling and snarling overwhelms him as the bonnet of the furthest car strikes him, snags him, and he goes down onto the bitumen with a horrible grinding of bone breaking in his hips. Gravel tears at his clothes and bites at his skin and he realises with a terrible clarity that he’s hooked to the racing cars.
Horrible laughter, ghoulish and mocking, rises over the sounds of dogs.
The road disappears underneath him, taking gouging strips of his skin with it. Urbanity vanishes from sight, and when he pulls his chin up enough to see, he is being dragged by three impossibly large hounds, fire spilling from baying mouths with lolling tongues. Alongside the track jeering figures appear in spreading blazes, cheering for every strip of flesh and bounce of breaking bone the ground claims.
His head hits something and his face pushes into the gravel, cheeks and nose tearing wetly, and teeth smashing on the ground. The cheering from the side of the road swells to a dull roar as one of the dogs veers left, and darkness threatens his vision with the horrible sensation of pressure on his arm in its socket.
Even as it starts to tear, he can’t help but feel that it would somehow be worse if they stopped running.
Rory Banks 