FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Chapter 2: Mirror, Signal, Out-Manoeuvre

Not for the first time, Nathan found himself incredibly isolated with Tom's absence from his surroundings. With nothing to look at except the Chevette's cracked dashboard, fake-chromed instrument cluster and mouldy carpets, he quietly pined for his jovial nature and company, not to mention his utterly-futile yet incredibly amusing act of slamming his feet into the middle of the passenger foot-well in the bizarre hope that it'd stop the car faster.

"Pfft; lovable derp" he sniggered to himself, released from some of his worry by the gritting-lorry that had come along this particular road earlier in the morning. The relaxation wouldn't last for much longer, however; the Council's snow budget ran out at the next turning off the main road, upon which only the tyre-tracks of previous vehicles brave enough to tackle this snaking, hedge-lined gauntlet of tarmac offered any inkling of grip. To make matters worse, Mother Nature was in the process of deciding whether to make it even more difficult for him or not; deep, heavy grey clouds were covering the sky, and an ever-quickening, ice-cold breeze whipped through the panel-gaps in the door-frame.

"Huh, someone's in a hurry..." he muttered grimly as the boxy behemoth of an old Land Rover turned with alarming speed onto the road a few metres behind him; no doubt a much more capable vehicle in these conditions, he knew he'd only hold it up. Mentally psyching himself for the challenge that lay ahead, he feathered the throttle pedal, but even the slightest flex of his right boot was enough to brake the rear-tyres loose, snaking the Chevette from side to side before he gathered it back up.

"Goddammit" he growled; the Land Rover was bearing down on his rear-window at an alarming rate, and its faded red paint was becoming increasingly familiar. "Wait a minute..." his brain clicked, "t'at's the same dick as t'e one who tailgated me on the...ugh." Sure enough, as Nathan navigated a gently-sweeping left-hander, the Land Rover's imposing square metal grille filled the Chevette's rear window.

"Alright, alright, I'll get outta' your way; jeez! Have some respect, pal; we're not all in cars like t'at" he muttered irritably, tutting as his head slowly shook in contempt. A passing place presented itself a few hundred metres ahead, intruding into the personal space of the hedge lining the road. It widened the snow-covered tarmac to a space barely large enough for two cars, but he figured the act of courteously pulling aside in the first place would be enough. Nathan maintained the level of driver awareness that had netted him almost a perfect score in his test by checking his mirrors and indicating in good time, guiding the Chevette into the kink in the road before applying the still-functioning hazard lights and bringing it smoothly to a stop. The Land Rover, however, chose to pull in behind him, stopping with its bumper almost kissing the little hatchback. With the low, gruff rattle of its diesel engine pounding against Nathan's ears, the driver emerged from the shadows of the windscreen, kicking open the door and beginning to step out of the 4x4. Sighing, Nathan facepalmed at the seeming lack of provocation that could net some drivers to be angry, but that irritation suddenly turned to abrupt laughter when he set eyes upon the driver's attire.

"What...the absolute f-..." It was one of the strangest attires he'd ever seen. The flabby physique of the man flipped in his side-mirror was straddled by a faded rag of a coat around his chest; the clothing abruptly dropping off at his hips, where an almost skin-tight, dark grey pair of trousers tapered off at the ankles. His feet, so painfully inappropriately dressed for the weather, were sheltered only by a peeling pair of slippers, and as if to conceal his identity from what Nathan could only assume was a wardrobe malfunction so embarrassing that even the wardrobe would've blushed, a black balaclava rendered only his cold, steel-sharp eyes on display.

"Pfft, fuckin' hippie; ooh, so threatening! Whachya' gonna' do; hit me over t' head with a plant?" He snorted, shuffling around in the seat to face the approaching tree-hugger. Stumbling along with a painfully apparent lower-body injury, the man pulled aside the left side of his coat to dive a bare hand into its labyrinth of ripped internal pockets, but as he did so, Nathan's smile evaporated. The thin grey trousers had been revealed as a full-length body suit, and set into the fabric of the man's shirt were gargantuan, red blotches. His blood ran cold.

"T'at's not..." it couldn't be anything else. The ferocity at which this revelation had hit him was so strong, his vocal chords jammed, leaving him gaping-mouthed as the man approached the grimy window. With his free hand, he clasped the opening in his balaclava and pulled the bottom half downwards, revealing a sight that caused a sickening feeling to rise in Nathan's throat, stopping a scream on the verge of his lips. Staring back at him was a face awash with sores, blotches and black patches of scorched, peeling skin, but it was at that moment, with his heart in his bone-dry throat, that Nathan noticed a slit of shiny metal emerge from the coat and point the tip of its blade directly at him. The man's hand lunged for the door-handle.

"No!" Nathan yelped, slamming a sweat-tinged fist onto the door-lock and driving it into the door-frame as the exterior handle clunked uselessly. He glanced upwards, and suddenly, the pair's eyes met for the first time...but the man's eyes told a different history. Lined with an unharmed pair of bristling brown eye brows, flanked by strands of wiry hair that escaped the balaclava's capture, his eyes brimmed with deep, pained disappointment; angled downwards and dead-eyed, they said more than words ever could, just like they had when Nathan had called the Social Services, and no doubt, too, when he realised that a majority of his money was sitting in the bank account of the seventeen-year-old opposite him.

"Open...the door..." his parched mouth flapped inaudibly. Whimpering, Nathan shook his head twice, already reaching for the gear-selector. The man's expression remained unchanged; a move that caught Nathan completely off-guard as his right fist swung back and hurled itself into the window, transforming the boy's view into a million, minute blood-lined cracks. Recoiling in abject fear, he wrestled the gear selector into drive and crushed the throttle against the carpet. For a single, frightening second, the back-tyres span uselessly on the layer of thin ice covering the road, before mercifully digging in and finding grip. With as much of a roar as the engine could muster, the car bucked forwards, squirreling down the road in a barely-controlled slide.

"Sweet Jesus...what've I done?!" gasping for breath, Nathan pulled a film of cold sweat from his forehead and clasped his quivering hands around the wheel, fighting to keep the car going where he wanted. There was no denying it; that Land Rover had been following him ever since he'd joined the Route 27 Highway. Pulling in and stopping had been an utterly stupid manoeuvre, but the luxury of hindsight was not something Nathan needed right now...in fact, he realised with a whimper, he'd walked himself straight into a trap of his own making. The single-track road was a piece of largely unbroken string between here and the sleepy village of Brockenhurst; somewhere with not-nearly enough regular crime to warrant the erection of a Police-Station. Turning around would be suicide, but if he continued...it was between a Land Rover and a ditch.

"Think; think, Goddamit!" he spat through gritted teeth; his brain barking the single, fierce order at his muscles; do, not, stop, moving. That, it transpired with the first solitary snowflake, would be easier said than done; within seconds, a thin haze of white dots began raining down, covering the scenery ahead in what would normally be considered picturesque. With a yelp, he fumbled for the thin wiper-stalk, waking the motors from their slumber to lazily slash across the windscreen, gasping exasperatedly at their sheer lack of effectiveness. The increasingly-thick layer of white mass that began to obscure his vision ahead forced him to slow down enough to get even a modicum of a grip on the situation; Nathan frantically groped underneath the radio and pulled out his mobile phone. His quivering hand hovered over the keypad, and not a moment too soon; a flash of red paint suddenly caught the corner of his vision, and it was approaching fast.

"Help..." he whimpered, silently willing the call to connect; to reach another voice; a tangible thread of civilisation. The speaker clicked.

"Easthampton Police Department, what's your emergency?" calmly asked a monotonous female voice, clearly at the end of her tether as to how many times she'd stated that one line.

"Look, you- you gotta' help me; my Da...I-I mean, o-one of Whiteheart Lane's Mental Patients i-is-!"

"Calm down and speak clearly, young man; you're getting ahead of yourself. Where are you?"

"I'm-" He didn't even register the fierce red mass that roared up behind him. The Land Rover crunched against the Chevette's bumper that was forced to buckle in withering fear, jerking it forwards and sending the phone hurling out of Nathan's suddenly outstretched arm, where it clattered uselessly onto the passenger foot-well; even this minor knock was enough to reset it, cutting him off from the last possible link to help he had.

" Fuck!" he roared, writhing against the worn seatbelt that sadistically held him back from reaching forwards. A crunch of foliage snapped his attention back to the road; in his frantic distraction, the Chevette had become very intimate with a line of hedge on the other side of a sharp right-hand turn. He pulled it back onto the straight and narrow, regaining control as the Land Rover remained foreboding in his rearward vision, but his muscles were already beginning to ache in protest. His vision was becoming blurred by slightly more than just the snow-covered windscreen as pools brimmed in his eyes.

_ "Argh, no, stop it you fucking baby!_" The shame of what Tom would say if he saw him like this shook the tears down his face. The road plunged under the first line of a white archway of trees that bowed down to the road's users, but soon the Land Rover was on him again; its headlights now ablaze, piercing two predatory eyes into the interior of its prey. The best lunged forwards, swinging out onto the other side of the road and accelerating before its front-wheel was lined-up perfectly with the Chevrolet's rear side-window. Anticipating the move, Nathan was halfway through heaving his boot from the pinned-throttle over to the brake when the Land Rover lunged, catching the rear-wheel arch with the edge of its bumper and tipping the Chevette sideways.

"Get off!" Baring his teeth, he steered as hard as he could into the slide, but no amount of resistance could counteract the laws of physics; the car was pushed towards the edge of the road and up the small bank, beyond which lay a parallel series of deep-rooted, immovable trees. Nathan snapped his vision around as the thick, brown pillars rushed up to the passenger window; the largest member of the pack knocking a glancing blow against the passenger door, smashing the plexiglass window into a thousand shards and leaving an indent so severe that the interior door-card bent with it. The Chevette was spun back to face the direction ahead, but kept rotating. There was no stopping it; with both his feet shoving the brake pedal almost through the carpet, Nathan frantically dived below the wheel as the nose careened into a tree. A sickening crunch pinballed through the cabin; the impact forcing the bonnet up and puncturing the radiator. Groaning, he clasped the side of the wheel and pulled himself upright, with nothing more than a slightly throbbing shoulder to show for it. Steam billowed from the front of the car, but a last minute decision to shove the transmission into park had kept the engine running. He only had a brief moment to appreciate his quick thinking; a sharp yelp escaped him as the Land Rover began to reverse.

"Just..._aaaargh,_come on!" The snow-infused verge, if anything, offered fractionally more grip than the icy road had given up, and the Land Rover momentarily surged ahead as Nathan slammed the transmission into reverse, yanking the steering wheel around and coercing the car off the bank, pulling the nose around to face where he'd just come from. Surging forwards with as much progress as he could was utterly futile; within seconds, the Land Rover had caught up once more.

"Go away!" he howled in near-drunken hysteria, the adrenaline now coursing through him in waves. His view out of the windscreen was now almost nothing but snow and overheating coolant, and it was showing; the speedometer scrabbled for anything higher than twenty. This time, the Land Rover pulled ahead and skidded sideways across the road, but a merciful avenue of escape presented him in the form of another turning that he'd missed; a narrow, hedge-lined junction that presented an even-less-significant road. His options were zero. He had to take it. Coercing his straining muscles into life, he slid the car around the junction and scrabbled up the road as fast as was mechanically possible. However, he suddenly noticed how distantly small the Defender had become in the ratting rear-view mirror, and it wasn't getting any closer.

"Huh?" There was no doubt about it; the Land Rover was dropping back. Constant merciless blows at the Chevette had finally, it seemed, taken their toll.

"He's broken down...oh sweet Jesus tell me he's broken down...come on' ya bitch!" the sheer relief that washed over Nathan like a physical entity almost returned the suppressed tears to his dinner-plate eyes. He slapped the steering wheel in-between delirious howls of joy, only just remembering the road surface he was on as the car approached a sharp left-hand corner; the exit of which was obscured by the steep bank to his right.

"O.K; just get outta sight and t'en I can call t'e cops on t'is nutter...oh fuck." The single, gasped curse was the only thing his turbulent brain could think to say at what had just presented itself through the windscreen. The road rose upwards; a sharp, long incline that culminated in a hairpin turn at its peak, and it had only just dawned on Nathan that there were no longer any tyre-tracks ahead of him. His heart-rate tripled.

"No, no...don't lemme' down now, car..." Driving examiners never tested their candidates in snowy conditions, least of all ones in Nathan's current mental state, and the end result was soon about to come back to bite him; he mindlessly slammed the throttle pedal to the floor, achieving nothing but completely eradicating any grip the rear-tyres previously had. Only when the Chevette lost its battle with gravity did he realise his mistake; the speedometer needle wobbled downwards towards single digits, passing them and continuing to plummet, further and further, until the guardrail on the other side of the road stopped moving past the shattered side-window altogether. As if to physically taunt him, the overheating engine chose that exact moment to cut out again.

"No...." a tinge of bitter defeat lined his cracked voice. He shoved the brake pedal to the floor, simultaneously yanking the handbrake in a desperate bid to keep the car where it was, but with all four wheels locked, the Chevette began to gingerly slide back down the hill like a sledge. It rotated as it did so, filling the view beyond the crumpled bonnet with the blurred view of a domineering rock-face before transitioning to a narrow country road again. Mashing the brake pedal in a vain attempt to allow the wheels a degree of slip only got him so far; the right-front-wing grinded along the guard rail in a shower of sparks; a situation that inadvertently slowed him down quicker than the brakes could do on their own. Finally wrestling the Chevette to a stop at the bottom of the hill, he took a deep, prolonged breath to regain what little composure he could salvage, before eyeing his phone, deep in the passenger foot-well.

"I swear, when I'm done wit' this, you're goin' in t'e trash!" he growled, glaring at the Christmas-tree of warning lights feverishly flashing across the car's dashboard, momentarily oblivious to the outside world. The façade that the Land Rover had played on him revealed itself only a millisecond before impact. The thirty-mile an hour lump of steel rocketed from behind the curtain of snow into the side of the helpless car like a freight train. With an ear-piercing cacophony of bending metal, the Chevette collapsed in on itself. The driver's side window instantly shattered, stabbing razor-sharp shards of glass into the entirety of Nathan's upper-body, but the seventeen-year-old didn't even have time to register the searing pain before the radiator grille punched clean through the door and kept going into the side of his head. Light flashed in front of his eyes as he was instantly knocked out, hurled towards the other side of the car as the seatbelt buckle gave way. The Defender's relentless attack continued, bulldozing what was left of the car against the resilient crash-barrier and buckling the entire body-shell into a papier-Mache shell of itself before, with a gruff rumble, slowly backing off its devoured prey.

?

A trail of thick, red liquid rolled over Nathan's eyes, continuing to meander its way along the contours of his face before rolling into his mouth. Choking on his own blood, he pulled himself fully back into consciousness through sharp, sickening wretches as droplets of the foul-tasting substance were sprayed over the glass-ridden carpets. Lying with his shoulders slumped against the passenger seat and his head supported by a pillow of broken glass, he was gripped by a sudden spike of excruciating pain from the lower half of his right leg. What was left of the driver's door had been forced downwards in submission from the Land Rover's front-left wheel, capturing his boot which in turn had held his leg in place; the pair crushing his leg like a grotesque sandwich. The entire left-side of his body was covered in coursing rivers of blood that dripped down onto the stained carpets like a rusty tap. Words escaped him. He could only let out an excruciating scream, sustaining it as he frantically writhed in unbearable agony in a vain attempt to pull himself free.

"Brrrrrrrrr; brrrrrrrr..." Out of the corner of his blood-stained vision, the green phone icon flashed upon his phone's screen; the vibrations shaking the device around the passenger foot-well carpet. It was the name above it, however, that forced his shivering body into action; Tom. He couldn't just sit there; resisting the stabbing pain spreading through his entire body, Nathan lunged downwards, bending his fingers like a claw, scrabbling for this salvation in plastic form. His leg was pulled free! Closer and closer they came, to the point where his fingers could almost feel the vibrations of the phone...the ringing ended. All that remained on the screen were the taunting word, "Missed call; Tom".

"No...." his voice cracked, lined with tears. A flaky, blood-caked hand closed itself around his throat.

"Long time no see, my boy. Enjoy lavishing yourself in my money, eh? Nice of you to pretend I was mad; really was." The all-too-familiar rasp of a gruff, raspy voiced hammered by countless cigarettes pounded against his ear as Nathan found himself yanked upwards; his vision a red, blurred mess. The light vanished; his vision was plunged into darkness as a cold, itchy fabric was pulled over his head. He screamed at the shards of glass pushed further into his body at the prison that was now surrounding it, but writhe and thrash as he might, Nathan was powerless as a series of thick buckles were pulled painfully tight around his torso, securing him within the confines of a jacketed prison.

"Let's see how you like being stuffed into this for twelve hours a day" his Father hissed, locking his arms around the straitjacket and hurling Nathan clear of the mangled car. He crashed into the unforgiving tarmac that was only marginally cushioned by the thin layer of slush crusting it, howling deliriously as his broken ankle was pounded by the asphalt beneath it.

"Oh, I'm sorry, is it too tight? Do you feel bounded by your own body?" his Father had eyed the shovel slumped across the back seat, and eagerly made a grab for it, "Well lemme' tell ya' something else, my boy; you know what happened when I didn't do_exactly_ as they said?" Nathan spat a thimble of blood onto the ground, digging what was left of his waterproof trousers into the slush as he tried desperately to crawl away.

"Well, they put me in my place, you see." The shovel was brought high above the man's head like a guillotine, swinging downwards in a lazy arc where it bore its full might against Nathan's right leg. An ear-piercing crack ricocheted through the forest. This fresh tidal wave of pain as the bones in his leg gave way was like nothing Nathan had ever felt before; hoarse from screaming, his voice cracked, then withered into a pathetic whimper.

"Look at you," he snarled, spitting onto his son's shaking body as he broke down into a barrage of sobs, "oh, you were so smarmy when you called that ambulance on me. The...the cheek of it! You never once stopped to think about me, did you? Now look where that's got you." He tossed the shovel to one side, darting back into the wrecked Chevette and retrieving the small, black, plastic smartphone.

"Aww, a message from your boyfriend; how sweet. If only he knew you for who you really were, Nathan. Oh" he paused; the tone of his voice rising in unison with his eyebrows at the end of the word, "I see the bitch changed her number, after all. Well then..." Close to losing consciousness, Nathan had become little more than a limp sack of meat and bones; completely powerless as his Father firmly grabbed his bent, broken leg and pulled, dragging him along the road as a trail of blood was left in his wake.

"She's gonna have a lovely start to her Christmas. Come on, lemme' take you on a little road trip; a little Father-son bonding, don't you think?"