The black tar on the road was hot on his arse. Very hot. The man gets up, feels the creak in his knees, the regular inane protest. He looks up and down the road again, no one in sight. All he can see is the vast emptiness around him, punctuated by the odd tree which has realised its loneliness and let itself go. A crow calls in the distance, a dying sound, hollow and wicked. The man looks at his beaten wreck of a car, he wish he knew more about it. It has stopped for some reason, he has no idea why. So here he sits, on the side of a road, many miles from anywhere, in the nowhere. He wasn’t exactly sure why he ended up on this road to the nowhere. It seemed as good an option as any other. He simply got into his car and drove on and on. Leaving it all behind, all the absurdness of the city, the meaningless bustle of his life. Now he was stuck in the absurdness of the wilderness, the negation of bustle.
It was hot. He had no water. His car was fucked. He had been sitting on the side of the road for hours now, only two cars had passed. The first driver pretended not to see him; he was staring down the road as if some vital event was taking place on the horizon. The second car was strange. There were two guys in the front and they slowed right down past him, almost coming to a stop. He felt like a specimen under their gaze, he was being weighed up. Whatever test they applied, he apparently failed, despite his pleas for help. They drove on, with one of them still looking back. So much for the old assumption the country people were inherently more helpful. So he waited on. He considered starting to walk, but it was so fucking hot. In addition to this he had no real idea where he was, he wouldn’t know what direction to head in. His mind was in a daze on his way to this junction, his body simply driving with no direction. The trip didn’t exist for him anymore, the memories didn’t stick, and they slid down the walls of his mind and congealed at the bottom in an unrecognisable heap. Vague landscapes, cars, signs. That’s it.
Hours past. A cool breeze began to pick up, which was pleasant, but it was filled with foreboding. The man shivered despite the remaining heat. A crow started calling again. Its cries reverberating in the emptiness of the landscape, warbling through the increasing breeze. Whenever the man thought back on this day, he remembered that crow call. It was evil, he was sure of it. It was taunting him, laughing at him from the end of days. It was the cause of the cataclysm, the perpetrator, the instigator, it rode a dark horse. The sun began to set, darkness crept in, and the bird kept calling. Sometimes it seemed near, sometimes far; so far that he wasn’t sure he could hear it. He could feel it though, it was a sign of the times, and you can’t ignore things like that.
The man was truly alone, huddled in his car in the cold. He was frightened, frightened in a way that made him think of his childhood. He looked out into the dark of the night, the night that had swallowed the emptiness. It was swallowing him. The crow had stopped calling a couple of hours ago. It stopped abruptly in mid-call, as if grabbed suddenly. The man was thirsty and hungry. Why were there no more cars? Surely the road can’t be this empty. He began to slip into sleep, but it was shallow. Rustle. The man sits bolt upright from his thinly spread slumber. Rustle rustle. What was that? His heart was pounding, he could hear it. Rustle. The man calls out. Silence. Must have just been a rodent of some sort, undertaking its nightly duties he muses. The man begins to relax again; his eyes start to close…
Blackness emerges from the dark with a clutter, claws scraping on the hood of his car. The man sits up and screams. The crow, it’s on the hood. It joins his screams with screams of its own. Ungodly screams. They fill the man’s head with pain. Horror fills his mind behind his closed eyes, he sees sinew, flesh, liquid, char, dying. His head feels like an inflating balloon. The crow cries on. STOP, STOP, STOP! The man screams at the top of his lungs, he can’t move, he’s paralysed. Time stretches out, he is in perpetual hell. Suddenly he realises that he can only hear his own screams. The crow has stopped. Silence returns. The man slowly opens his eyes and turns towards the hood of the car. The crow is watching him. Waiting. Suddenly a blinding flash comes from its eyes. The man tries to shield his, but the pure light is already beginning to fade by the time his shaking hands reach them. The crow departs suddenly, revealing a growing orange plume on the horizon. Growing and growing, high into the sky, like a beautiful rose growing out of a thick black. The power holds the man; he is helpless against the awe of such complete destruction, such annihilation. The distant sky is burning, and you can’t ignore things like that. A crow calls in his head and he understands. The catastrophe has begun.