Terminal, p.1
TERMINAL, page 1
TERMINAL
A COLLECTION
ADAM M BOOTH
TERMINAL
ADAM M BOOTH
© 2016 Adam M. Booth
Published: 27th July 2016
Publisher: Adam M. Booth
Editor: L. C. Davies
Digital Edition
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DRIVE
ANGELA
THE END
TERMINAL
ADJECTIVE
1. FORMING OR SITUATED AT THE END OR EXTREMITY OF SOMETHING.
2. (OF A DISEASE) PREDICTED TO LEAD TO DEATH, ESPECIALLY SLOWLY; INCURABLE. (OF A CONDITION) FORMING THE LAST STAGE OF A TERMINAL DISEASE.
3. THE END OF A RAILWAY OR OTHER TRANSPORT ROUTE, OR A STATION AT SUCH A POINT.
DRIVE
ADAM
M
BOOTH
CONTENTS
F
3/4
THE MACHETE MAN
1/2
THE COMPANY
1/4
LISA
THE SNAKE
THE BOY
THE PLAN
E
EPILOGUE
See the man, sat in the vehicle, neon lights warping over his windscreen and his eyes and his mind, night time filling in the gaps wherever there was an absence of anything. Love. Guilt. Mercy. Blank spaces.
He is not a young man, but he is not so old that his grip and his fist aren't a vice and a rock when he needs them to be, that his eyes and his loins aren't red hot pokers when he wants them to be. And see his mouth, a tear in leather. It hides a tongue that can still taste you on the air, and the shadow he casts hides a man that can still split you and slit you and end your life with his weapons of metal and meat.
F
David pulled the van door shut with a slam. Metal found metal and the night settled around him. He breathed it deep. It was done. Finally. They were where they ought to be, hanging from the meat hooks in the back, drugged, bound and gagged, and they wouldn't wake up for a good couple of hours. Plenty of time to get home. Plenty of time. He swigged flat coke from a big bottle and slapped his timeworn face. Wake up David. Stay awake. He had a full night ahead of him, with a van full of fun, a tank full of diesel, and a spare at his feet, just in case. The battered old diesel can sloshed in the footwell and filled the small space with the perfume of ozone and industry. A bag of sharp metal sat at his side, eye slits for button holes unblinking, while the open road stretched out ahead of him full of possibility. There was just one last thing to do. Drive. He would guide his secret cargo carefully through that night, flickering between the headlights and hoardings like a shadow animal made of fists and fingers and an absence of light, almost invisible to those that lived in that light, a nightmare they chose not to see until his knife were at their neck, and his teeth were at their bone.
Neon strips reached down the dark alley from the bright street and stroked his wet brown eyes. He pictured those dense bundles of pleasure swinging from the thick hooks a few feet behind him. The secret things that he had secured in the back of the vehicle from which he delivered meat for cash in the pale of the day. A pleasing heat grew behind his eyes and in his big hands and with one of them he gripped the wheel, and with the other he turned the key. The engine roared into the cold, wet night and he pulled the white van out of the shade of the alleyway and onto a seedy street that hummed with cars and call girls and commercials.
The wheel rotated in his hot damp hands. Home. No diversions, just him, the open road, the two in the back, and all his terrible desire. Desire that could only take him to one place, a place between the pines where he parked the van, then down to the boathouse by the lake, then down again, beneath that boat house, beneath everything. It would be a long, electric night. And it had to be tonight. Lisa was away. It had to be tonight. But patience David, patience, the city streets were busy and the last thing he needed was to get pulled over. That was the last thing he needed.
“Step out of the vehicle. Open the back”.
NO. No. That couldn't happen. The tight leather wheel squeaked in his fist as he rumbled along, his mind ticking through city streets while his mobile phone sat idle in the trunk of his wife’s car, many miles away. No GPS. No trace. Using only his wits he navigated a path toward his normal route home from the depot, back toward the place where, if noticed, he could pretend that tonight was just like any other night. But it wasn't. No, tonight was special. Tonight was about an old man's dreams and teenage screams.
David cut through the dimming day, windows and headlamps staring, winking, and the eyes behind them doing the same. He took the lowest roads in the moon-cast shade of peak and hill, hiding in the smog and shadows that had served him so well. The road curved away from him, up and over bracken dunes and into an orange-bloomed horizon. He followed it. The grime in the sky curled in a desolate tidal wave, filling his vision with a texture that reminded him of a badly tuned TV. His squint bore through it. He picked out a recently burned out car still smouldering on a scrap of rough land. A man stood by it. A solitary silhouette. A charcoal scar against the amber sky. Through those badlands the road slithered, greasy, black, and he was only too happy to go where it lead him.
Tarmac and white lines slid beneath him, taking cars and buildings and people far away. Take them away. Take them all away.
Cruising, he needed music. The radio fizzed between broadcasts and landed on a station playing a song, slow and steady. Through a crackling speaker a finger slipped down a C string and the guitar shrieked. He was sure he'd heard this song before, maybe as a teenager, but maybe never at all. His eyes narrowed as he tuned his mind to an echo across time, someone singing words of yearning, years ago. Yes, he remembered the song. He was too young to know such weariness back then, but he recognised the sentiment now. Those words meant what they meant but the beat of the drum and the ache of the old guitar told their own story, hot and lazy. He was behind the terraced house again on that late and lazy summer day, the two of them on the bare limits of the coastal town they grew up in, so close he could smell their sweet sweat as their clothes came up and off… His jeans were so tight. He had to get home.
The landscape undulated away from him and as it reared up over the horizon David saw a long line of traffic snaking slowly over the hill. He joined the queue. Distant lights flashed all red and blue and urgent and his brow knit. This wasn't good. There were too many people in this fucking world, he chided, even after all his hard work. Too many eyes still attached to too many brains by judgmental nerves. He queued. In the noxious breath of exhaust fumes David coughed and wheezed and his weakened mind set sail in the methane haze. In it he saw a splattered collage of the deaths that brought him here. Screaming girls and bleeding boys. Murdered fathers and buried brothers. His mother, dead on the day he was born, his blood lust desperate from that very first minute. That demon. That dragon. He had only ever known the woman from the inside out, but his brother had known her in the natural way. Paddy had seen her face and stroked her hair and sucked her tit, so he had something to miss. David was just glad to have gotten out of her. But now this fucking motionless line of cars and lights were testing him, God damn it. Those rouge and blue lights were too close, too urgent, their light licking over his bonnet like a tongue tasting him on the air. Could he back away? Turn round and take a different route? The only other route he knew would take him past work. Past the depot and the office. It was late, but that didn’t mean there would be no-one there that knew him. And it would add time, but so would staying here, and that ketamine wouldn’t keep those two back there quiet all night. He looked in his mirror. Behind him the cars tailed and hummed, their lights and engine heat shivering into the distance like the tail of a cobra. Fuck it. He threw the van into reverse and spun it around, flashing and thumbing at the cars that blocked his exit. A bewildered woman in her beige fifties struggled with her gearstick and wheel until she was up on the curb, letting him through, her face set, some instinct telling her not to react to that volatile van full of hormones and hubris. He raged away, turning onto a wide, clear avenue where the space stretched out forever and for while the breathing was easy. He leaned on the vinyl door with a dusty elbow and watched as the world ran towards and then away from him. The light was strange tonight, he thought. Black, but purple, and thick like a liquid. He drove into it, left then right, then right again, following instincts that he thought to be galvanised, instincts that had kept him alive this long. The radio sang to him stories of screen d
Ahead of him David saw a burst of red steam and smelled the bitter strike of brake fluid in his filtered air. A road traffic accident. He slowed down and drove by. The scene was silent except for the hissing of gasses, unseen so far by anyone but him, the universe holding it in stasis, waiting to show someone what it had done. Two motorcyclists had united in a fatal collision. Their handlebars and collarbones were knitted like antlers, carburettors and aorta fused, conjoined twins sharing their steaming hearts. Dead bodies and dead engines pumping their last thick liquids into a slick, lascivious puddle in an orgy of metal and meat. He slowed down. He salivated. He wanted to get out and kneel in that mixture of man and machine. He wanted to lift up those battered helmets and see their black eyes in their broken faces and kiss their purple lips. He wanted to writhe in their cooling entrails and add his own fluids to this cocktail of effluvia, but over his shoulder he felt the pressure of those red and blue lights again. His glance cast back. It wouldn’t be long till they were here too, flashing over the scene, seeing into his soul and stealing his future, so despite his driving sex and his lusting blood he drove, he drove, he drove, but with each wrong turn the world around him became less and less his own. The heavy light pulled him on, David’s foot pumping diesel, his hands stroking leather, while lust fought loss behind the eyes that ached in his head. Pictures played behind those dispassionate globes. He thought about his brother, about Patrick, a man too soon. He remembered the wiry hair that grew on his legs and chest. Paddy was one of those boys who got wide and hairy sooner than most, a taut bomb of brawn and bone, threatening to explode out of his school uniform and into manhood at any minute. He thought of the floor boards of Paddy’s bare bedroom, those hairs still deep between the cracks, the dust he left behind, his skin and hair leaving a trace of him in somebody else's home. And he remembered looking through another crack, the crack in his father’s door. Through it a fist of meat and muscle, made of three men, flesh churning, grinding, eating itself, sculpting new forms, square and hard. Fur beaded with sweat and tears, knuckles and teeth clenching and gripping. His own breath leaving him. A song playing behind all this, a song on a cassette he recorded from a VHS tape. A song from a movie made for TV, the ads chopped roughly out of it. A woman’s voice calling up to him, singing to him, a melody of fear through layers of analogue hiss.
There it was, across the cross roads, the industrial park that his distribution centre backed onto, and beyond that his way home, zigzagging across the city like a path worn in dry earth. From where he was he could even see the top three floors of the office, tall and grey above the factories and sheds. Did he see lights on floor eight? Yes, yes he did. Human Resources must be working late. His heart made a fist. What if they saw him drive past? Maybe Helen would leave at the exact time he was pulling round the corner. He'd told her he was away fishing. If she saw him she'd wonder why he was still in town so late, and she was friends with Lisa on Facebook… He would have to wait. He would have to wait there in the relative dark for that solitary light to go out. The idea angered and frustrated him, but he had no choice. He wrenched the van to the side of the road, choosing a place between two streetlights, and sat in salty stillness, chastising himself for getting so settled here in this loveless grid of concrete and rust.
Time passed but the light in the building he worked from still shone out, looking for something to see in the amber dark. David’s big boot tapped out his impatience on the rubber floor and his brain felt like the space between radio stations. The minutes took their time, moving like melting wax, and while the blood in his veins raced under his skin, his breath stalled in his chest. If he could move, he could breathe. But he couldn’t move, and he couldn’t breathe. He turned his impatient fist and rapped his knuckles on the plastic interior of his van, the way his own father had on those long nights when her absence forced them into each other’s company. David looked over at the ghost of himself that haunted his passenger seat, seeing himself sat small on those ancient nights, thin arms, short shorts and bone pale skin. He felt the presence of his father riding wide and silent in his own worn chair, each of them staring through the glass at their own dark world, each begrudging and ambivalent in their own lonely way. He pictured the lay-bys too, black notches of road where he'd sit lonely in the cab, listening to the bushes rustle till his Daddy came back smelling of sweat and shame and secrets. Now what a man does in the shade of his own shadow is of no one else’s concern, David reminded himself, not father, not son, nor mother nor wife. The flesh wants what the flesh wants and to deny it is to deny what makes a man a man. Dad had told him as much whenever David asked too many questions, and age had only taught him that his father had been right. He’d had seen too many men fall apart that way, choosing lace curtains from a rack, blunting their tusks pretending to care which couch they died into. Let a man be a man, Dad had said, and let a woman do whatever it is that women do.
Eventually the last light blinked out and for a moment the building was as dark as he wanted it to be. Then something flickered. The automatic fluorescents in the stairwell shuddered on and off, one after the other, following the lone, late worker as she descended the building and made her way to the car park. David's breath pushed against the inside of his chest and time hardened around him. Come on woman! Get out of the fucking way. Finally, the gate rose and fell and the last car left the park. At once he became one with his square white vehicle and sped away fast - too fast - fast enough to attract attention, so he pulled his foot back a little, fighting the muscles in his big leg that wanted to stamp the ground flat and turn the world vague with his speed. Carefully he drove right onto the street outside his building, then left onto the dual carriageway that cut the city in two, and finally he was moving and he was breathing and he was swelling in anticipation. He carved through the dark, then crested a hill, sick with a sodium glow, and slid down the other side, streetlights darting past like fireflies, embers pocking the night sky over the jaundiced macadam. The yellow light reminds him of a static sunset and for a while he daydreams. He daydreams of seasides and suicides.
David’s daydreams and detours had taken him to the edges of the next town over, where an abandoned shopping complex stretched out over the black land. How had he ended up here, he wondered. This was the wrong place to be for anyone, especially a man like him on a night like tonight. He was too close to her out here, too close to the lives they lived and to Lisa’s sister’s house, where she was spending the night doing whatever those girls did when he wasn’t looking. Their proximity gave him chills and he shivered as he rumbled past the petrol station they stopped at for fuel whenever they were in this neck of the woods. At least he thought it was the same petrol station. They all looked so bloody alike. Something itched in his brain. Was he even where thought he was? He looked through the mirror, back down the road at the sleeping mall, but it was gone. In its place was the shape of a church and a graveyard, only a shade darker than the sky, row upon row of sandstone saints and marble Marys made simple by night’s black veil. He blinked red eyes. Where was the shopping centre? Had it gone? He was sure he had seen it, but perhaps it had just been a trick of the light. No, the shopping centre was definitely here. He knew it for a fact. He’d been here before. The strange shape cut from the sky behind him was the just the way it looked from this angle, twisted and distorted through his mirror, he told himself, then the church bell tolled three times. He felt himself hot. Not in the slick, tight way he had planned for later, but from a feeling he hadn't had in a while. Hot from the fear that he might be vulnerable. It was the kind of heat that formed a cold sweat. The paradoxical kind. He unbuttoned his shirt a little and turned up the fan. “I should have taken that bloody sat nav,” he thought. “Sometimes a man just needs a little help.”
