The Turning

24

24

“Christ,” the ambulance driver, Nick Robertson said. His colleague said nothing, only peered around at the town. They had taken the corner from the Leeton/Tormon sign a tad too sharply and he had pressed down hard on the breaks before they had run right into the crowd circling the bank.

“Jesus, what’s this? A protest?” Nick muttered. His colleague glanced at him.

“L-look at their faces,” he said. Nick shook his head in disbelief. There must have been close to a hundred people standing there, slowly beginning to approach the ambulance. Their faces were falling off, some hanging at the corners like frayed wallpaper, dangling in the breeze like rubber. In the same instant, he saw what they were carrying and instinctively rolled the gear into reverse.

He thought of the accident they had passed on the road to Leeton. It had been a bad one- a truck had clean up a four-wheel drive with a lady in it, the remains scattered across the road. Despite the fact that they had told the presiding police that there had been a man out here suffering a heart attack, they had had to wait almost ten minutes before the cops and allowed them to pass the c*****e. The truck driver had luckily survived with only a laceration to the forehead. He had been sitting in the front seat of a police cruiser waiting for an ambulance from Griffith, wearing a fluoro singlet dotted with blood, arms bronze with tan, pointing at the truck and then at the flipped, mangled wreckage of the four-wheel drive. He had pointed back up the road to another police wagon with the door ajar, a body bag lying on the ground. It had been an accident but the driver had felt a chill roll down his spine at the sight of it. It seemed that there had been more going on than what met the eye.

He had tried to ignore it as they'd approached the Wilton turn-off, trying to focus and relax so they could reach the heart attack victim promptly, but he had been unable to shrug off the deepening dread. He had seen dozens of accidents, a few which had been even worse than that one, but for some reason, it had dug at him.

Now his eyes were set on the crowd and he couldn’t help but form an imaginary parallel between this and that accident, the folks of Wilton with their axes and guns and rakes and knives and the sight of that black body bag lying beside that police cruiser. What was going on here?

He gradually lightened his foot off the clutch and began to reverse. Nearly almost everyone in the crowd had spotted them now and were making their way forward.

“What’s going on Nick?” his colleague demanded. “Should we turn around?”

“No,” Nick said.

“Should we get out and see what the deal is?”

Nick thought it sounded sensible enough, yet he didn’t like the way they were looking at him and holding those farm tools, gripped and clenched in sweaty, overworked country hands. It seemed to him that it would be like walking into a burning building. Something was wrong with these people. They appeared diseased and malformed; this much was evident by the condition of their faces.

“I think we should just wait for the cops,” Nick said. He began to reverse again as they neared the front of the ambulance.

Neither of them saw the sign looming up behind them until the back window had obliterated. Both men were thrown forward slightly.

“f**k!” Nick cried. Both men glanced back at the disheveled equipment in the back, now littered with glass. Nick’s colleague turned to him.

“I don’t like this, we should go. This is like a fuckin’ Stephen King movie.”

“Just leave?”

“Why not?”

Because there was a man here who was dying if he hadn’t already, and they had a job to do.

“I can’t just abandon someone if they need help,” Nick said.

“We might be dying soon! Look how close they are!”

He was right. Some had come far enough to reach the hood. Nick put the ambulance in drive and tried to accelerate past the group. He didn’t see the woman until he had hit her, her body tumbling over the windshield. There was a flash of a dress and a heavy, cracking thump. Nick had only seen her in a blurred second but it had been enough to know that she had been drooling the way those who have suffered permanent brain damage will. Drooling as though the circuits in her brain had malfunctioned. She had been holding a pitchfork which had struck the right head-light with a terrible clank.

“She’s dead!” his colleague screamed. He had wound down the window and was poking his head out.

“Dave, get your ass back in-“

“You just killed her! Look!”

“Of course not, what do you think this is? f*****g Gran Theft Auto? She’s stunned, you of all people should know that!”

Except that was a downright lie and he knew it. They had both heard the way her body had rolled off the roof like a dummy, like a lifeless rag-doll thing, and he had no doubt in his mind that she would be lying there on the side of the road with her eyes open, unmoving. His eyes flashed to the review mirror and he saw that they were in the ambulance, staggering and lurching towards them like a pack of zombies.

Well come on and let me know, should I stay or should I go? Now, to top off the madness of the moment, that old song by The Clash was playing in his head. He had heard it on the radio that morning and now in his panic, it seemed like the song was summing up the situation better than anything.

“Use your brain,” Nick said. “Pull your finger out! They’re-”

Something whistled past the window, a blur of metal and wood accompanied by a thick, dull thud. His colleague, who had had his head out the window in that moment, was violently thrust downwards, the window shattering, glass slithering into his chest. Nick screamed. Hands reached in for the limp body and accompanying this were the blows and crashes of ensuing destruction. On the ground ahead of him, twisted and broken, blood pooling from her head, the woman he had been sure he had killed, began to get up, hands reaching blindly for her pitchfork.

“f**k!” Nick screamed. He put the ambulance in drive but saw that they had rounded their way to the front, crawling and clambering up onto the hood. They began to attack the windscreen, cricket bats and axes and hammers and fists, all arching downwards. He was frozen, unable to do anything except watch it. When he spotted the outline of a Winchester shotgun through the cracks in the glass, he ducked. The sound was deafening, the bullet grazing the cap of his head, splitting his hairline, a fine mist of blood rising. He screamed in agony but saw the UHF from the corner of one swelling eye and groped for it.

“Help, HELP, we’re-“

The door was torn open. Hands were pulling at his uniform, yanking at his hair and shirt lapels. He gripped the microphone, pulling it with him and didn’t let go even after the chord had snapped. His high-pitched, desperate screams were a catharsis of violence in itself, of pain and fear and determination not to die despite the incredible odds at this point. He hit the gravel, faces bending and sneering, and then one man came forward with a cricket bat, raised it high above his head

“-NO DON’T-”

and closed Nick’s eyes forever.

They began to replicate the procedure, stabbing and belting and killing, weapons rising and falling in quick, succinct arcs. Before they were done he was no more than a bloody indistinguishable pulp. Eventually, they tethered off and the crowd drew away, disinterested.

Late afternoon was giving way to twilight with the promise of a cool evening ahead.

A couple of the town’s folk got into the ambulance while some others loaded all three bodies- the pitch folk woman included- into the back. The ambulances engine was a solitary hum after the driver had turned off the alarm and the lights. They turned the vehicle around and headed up Giles Street a little way before turning left onto Benerembah Street and into the village.

Someone went to a neighboring lawn, dragged a garden hose like a python and hosed the blood off the road. Some others swept the glass into the dirt. But most of them followed the ambulance.

Halfway down Benerembah Street, many dropped onto all fours and began to crawl, the slow awkward jerks of a primate mimicking the movements of a dog. But by this stage they had become more akin to it, giving in to the new stage of their rapid metamorphosis. In given time their human appearance would melt away entirely, leaving them as monsters.