Twist Of Fate

Nineteen

The air is warm. Close. Stifling.

My vision is hazy, as though I am looking through cloud. 

There is a strange ringing in my ears, the only sound amidst the deafening silence that surrounds me like a blanket, smothering me and causing me to take deep breaths of thick, summer air.

I am walking across a blank plain, rubble and dust beneath my feet and the horizon stretching before me, empty and unmarked, with nothing but empty space all around me. Despite the expanse and the obvious freedom I feel panicked and trapped, as though I am imprisoned in a small space and unable to escape. 

I quicken my pace, hoping to dispel the claustrophobia that makes no sense in the middle of nowhere and hurry across the uneven floor, desperate to find someone or something I recognise. The more ground I cover, the less I seem to move. I spin around, a hysteria rising in me that I have never before experienced, as I squint into the dim light for any sign of life. There is nothing. I slow to an eventual stop and lean forward, my hands on my knees and my back hunched over, taking long, deep breaths and trying to calm my inner panic. My hair, somehow long again, is sticking to the sweat on the back of my neck. 

Ahead of me, visible in the evening twilight, is a shape; a mass on the ground, like a pile of rags but with more substance. I am drawn towards it, fearful yet curious. My feet carry me forwards and I become aware of the distant sounds of traffic, possibly from the street beyond the tower block rising up in front of me. Garage music filters from one of the open windows on the third floor, and behind me I hear the distinct creak of a rusty swing from the children's play area barely moving in the delicate evening breeze. I'm not sure how I suddenly came to be here but I am thankful for the familiar surroundings of the estate, and let out a sigh of relief at being near home. 

The shape on the ground seems to be moving as I approach it, and I am less than six feet from it when I realise it is a person curled in the foetal position, clothes dirty and ripped, face turned away from me. The jeans are dirty and bloodstained and to the side of the head is a pool of dark liquid - I can only assume it is blood - lying stagnant in the dirt, sticky and congealed, like tar. How long they have been here I do not know. I let out an exclamation of shock but to my surprise it makes no sound as it leaves my mouth, and no matter how loudly I shout for help, my cries are silent.

I take a step closer and am standing right over them when the smell hits me: a putrid odour that hits the back of my throat and makes me retch, a stench of death and decay that fills my nostrils, my mouth, my eyes, and seems to permeate my skin. It is then that I notice the face is no longer there; replaced instead by a gaping hole that is crawling with maggots. 

I stumble backwards, horrified at my discovery, and whirl around desperately, looking for help. I shout again but it is as though someone has pressed the mute button and I am unable to make a sound, even in my own head. I turn back to the body and look it up and down, and it is then that I recognise the pair of filthy black Converse trainers adorning the feet. My eyes flick up to the torso, to the Burberry jacket that I have seen countless times across from me in the Flute, and the gaudy gold chain lying limply around the wrist. 

Chris.

I am rooted to the spot, unable to tear my eyes away from this gruesome sight, yelling over and over for help. But no one comes. I may be able to see the buildings and hear the distant hum of life, but they are useless to me if I am invisible and inaudible to them. 

The smell of rotting flesh is suffocating me and I cover my mouth and nose with my sleeve. Out of the corner of my eye I am sure, for one heart-stopping moment, that his leg twitches. I stare down at him, eyes wide, motionless, watching to see if it is my imagination playing tricks on me. Another flicker of movement extracts a grunt of surprise and fear from my lips, and before I can holler for help again the body moves for a third time, slowly pulling itself to a sitting position, its empty face turned towards me, wriggling and writhing with maggots. 

My screams are no longer silent. I turn and run across the empty wasteland towards the gap between two high rise flats, aware of the commotion I am making and terrified to turn around in case the corpse has climbed to its feet and is following me. I run further, faster, past houses, shops, cars, trees, on and on until my legs give way and I sink into the softness of the ground with a gentle bump and a gasp.

My eyes fly open in shock and I sit up abruptly, my head touching the fabric of the tent above me, the gentle sound of snoring a couple of feet away in the blackness. It takes me half a minute to pull myself back to the here and now, and to believe it was just a dream and that there isn't a dead, decaying body outside the tent waiting for me. I lie back down on my airbed, my heart rate finally slowing as I take deep breaths of clean, sweet, unpolluted air. 

I am glad for the first time in a long time that I am not alone.