night falls on a neglected country town. one glance at the tattered movie marquee is all i need to tell me that sitting through Lassie and the other fifties family fare on offer would not fulfil my idea of a nifty night out. i decide to catch the next bus home, even though the movie theatre is quaint with its musty red velvet curtains, brass fittings - and they serve beer.
crossing the road to the bus, an aggressive female voice invades my peace "got any change for the bus?" she is darkly belligerent, blocking my path. i fumble in my wallet, uncomfortable and uneasy as she stands too close, her dark eyes roaming greedily over my few possessions. "aha a mastercard! maybe i'll steal that later", she leers. "fine! there's nothing in my account anyway - i am a student you know." i flash, rising with injustice. i hate her and want to be as far away from her as possible. as she is catching the bus, i get off and decide that maybe a sanitised movie in the quiet of the theatre would be preferable, and of course she follows me.
suddenly i'm with my friend vanessa, and we hurry away from the town along a lonely road through the rustling trees and whispering fields. this place seems perpetually on the verge of darkness: the eternally dying sun casts a pall of greyish fading light over all, and the dark girl still follows.
we come to a ramshackle cemetery; leaning stones poke through the gloom like accusing fingers, and ancient smashed tombs gape like toothless mouths. taking my hand, vanessa leads me through the stones, through the dead lands, to a tomb where she says a young boy lives. we crouch to enter the cracked opening through which i note that it's no darker inside. i can see evidence of living amid death; mouldering and stained cushions scattered, and a telephone. the more i look around, the more corpses are apparent: two dusty skeletons against the far wall, their coffins long past collapse; some other lifeless figures that seem rudely hewn from polystyrene meat-trays; more figures near the door that don't look like human remains at all - on account of having skulls one metre long with grossly elongated eye-sockets and deformed ribcages. while i gape at my surroundings, vanessa tries to use the phone and the nasty girl stands in one shadowy corner.
vanessa and i leap from graveyard to hail a passing motor-cyclist. hastily glancing behind to see the menacing girl gaining on us, we both straddle the bike clinging onto the man urging him to go NOW. we ride through the unchanging landscape of dry dead fields and stunted dark trees for perhaps half an hour when the man becomes crazy. he stops the bike and faces to accuse us of denying the girl the opportunity for a ride. "she was only eighteen, and you left her there in the middle of nowhere!" he spits, his eyes blazing and face distorted by madness. we try to explain that she was not at all the vulnerable and innocent virgin that he supposes, and i interject somewhat miffed "i'm only 24!" this only spurs the man on to rape and physically abuse vanessa.
as if through a haze of blood and pain i see her bruised, bleeding anguished face as he grunts on top of her. my crimson rage wells up inside me giving me strength to deliver his righteous punishment. thrusting my granite hands forward i grasp his fleshy windpipe, twisting this way and that, curiously observing his purple face with its eyes bulging in terror and disbelief. with a crack his neck is broken and i toss his body aside like a broken doll.
vanessa and i go back to the tomb as the alien corpses emit a powerful healing substance for our wounds. everything is going to be ok. we decide to take some of the cushions back to our flat, the ones that aren't too stained with decomposition juices (the corpses were laid with their heads on them). the dead have no need of comfort.
copyright 1995 lisa bode