Suddenly the dark was illuminated by bright, glaring spotlights and the silence was replaced by the sound of a roaring engine.

“Be careful!” Liam yelled as he pulled Lydia by the arm. He lost his balance and they both toppled over, rolling head over heels down the little embankment on the side of the road.

Shaun watched as a red Volvo swerved and then crashed into a stationary vehicle stopped across the centre of the road. The backside of the car lifted until it was vertical before it flipped over onto the car beneath it and with a scraping of metal against asphalt the bonnet started to lift. Shaun followed the trajectory of the car into the sky, unable to look away. The sound of the metal bumper crunching and screeching, and then crashing onto the roof of the Jeep behind him, snapped him out of his trance. He darted out of the way, diving into the ditch where he saw Liam and Lydia disappear moments before.

There was a loud thud sound and then everything was quiet again as it had been only minutes before. Back to the new normal.

They crawled back up the muddy side of the ditch, grabbing on to tufts of grass to give them leverage.

As Shaun lifted his head over the precipice of the ditch, he was looking straight into the eyes of the man driving the red Volvo. “He is bat shit crazy,” Shaun murmured mostly to himself.

The man’s hair was parted into a middle path, plastered down by a mask of reddish-brown blood and framing the barcode on his forehead. He peered at Shaun from blood speckled sockets. From the corner of his left eye there was a line of red following the side of his nose and ending just above his top lip. It looked like the man was crying a river of blood. The man gave Shaun a confused look, and then focussed on the door handle beside him. It looked as if he could not figure out how to use it.

A kid in jeans and a blood splattered T-shirt came running from the other side, roaring strange, gibberish sounds at the top of his lungs and waving his hands at the sky.

“Duck,” Lydia whispered. “Don’t let him see us.”

The kid slowed down, his arms stopped in mid-wave above his head, and only his fingers were moving in a rapid motion. He looked in their direction.

Lydia held her breath.

Then there was a stampede of running feet as hundreds of people were running past. Not all, but most were waving their arms in the air above their heads, while others had their arms flop around by their sides, as if they had no control over their motor skills.

The kid lost interest in whatever he was looking at and followed the crowd.

Lydia dared to take a breath.

It was a long time, long after they could no longer hear the sound of feet slapping against the ground and the only sound that could be heard was the man in the Volvo banging against the car door to get out, when Shaun whispered, “This is worse than I thought it was.”

Lydia said softly, “I told you people were acting strange.”

“Yes, you also told us about the people in the shop,” Liam said to Shaun.

“Yeah, but I thought it was just random crazy.”

Lydia looked worried. “Do you think everyone who had the barcode, and the chip are like this now? Switched off. Even my mum?”

Liam said nothing as he dragged himself over the edge of the ditch and turned over to sit, facing away from the man in the Volvo.

Shaun said, “We need to do something about your leg before it gets worse.”

“Are you both going to ignore me?” Lydia huffed.

Shaun said, without looking at her, “Let’s worry about first things first. It’s useless speculating.”

“But everyone has gone crazy,” she said with a hitch she could not help in her voice.

Shaun turned to look at her, and raised his eyebrows in what he hoped was a sympathetic look. “First things, first. Okay?” He turned to Liam. “Do you need help getting back into the car so that I can have a look at your leg?”

“Just help me up,” Liam lifted his hand and reached for Shaun. “I can manage once I’m up.”

Shaun grabbed Liam by the hand and pulled him up.

Liam limped back to the Jeep, ducking under the silver bumper balancing across the roof, until he was seated on the back seat.

Shaun tutted, “Now the wound is caked with mud too.”

Liam grinned. “Work your off-grid magic. I doubt we’ll find a doctor in a hurry.”

Lydia grabbed the first aid kit from the back. “Thank goodness the Volvo didn’t crash into the back of the Jeep. All that stuff we found would have been lost, otherwise.”

Shaun carefully folded back the makeshift bandage Lydia had applied earlier to stop the bleeding. He looked back at Lydia, “Pass me a torch, please.”

Lydia rushed to get the flashlight from the back of the car and handed it to him.

He handed the flashlight to Liam. “Hold it still, so that I can see what’s going on.”

Liam held up the flashlight and aimed the bright circular light at the small, ragged hole in his calve.

Shaun leaned closer to see better. “It doesn’t look as if the bullet had hit a tendon or a major muscle.” He glanced up to look Liam in the eye. “You were lucky.”

Liam grumbled. “I don’t feel lucky.”

“If the bullet had hit an artery, the bleeding wouldn’t have stopped, and you would have died in the snow back there… So… Yeah, you are lucky…But…With us waiting so long, it might get infected, though.”

“We had more urgent things to do, like not get caught and thrown in jail… Or worse.”

“Martyrdom is not a good look on you,” Shaun mumbled. His fingers hovered over the wound for a second as if he was gathering the courage to do what he had to do because he knew that it would cause Liam agony.

“What are you waiting for?” Liam asked.

“Grit your teeth,” Shaun warned him.

Shaun pushed hard against Liam’s leg to establish if the bullet had broken any bones.

Liam squirmed but he did not scream in pain, which to Shaun was a good sound.

Shaun dug around in the first aid kit that was laying open in the footwell beside him. “Take a deep breath,” he told Liam.

Liam screamed a sound that sounded like it came from the depths of Hell when Shaun poured the contents of a bottle of antiseptic straight from the bottle over Liam’s wound. He fell back onto the seat behind him, clenched his fists, and went still.

Fresh snow started to flurry down around them.

Lydia shivered as she stood behind. Her fingers were so cold that she was starting to lose the feeling in them.

Shaun layered some of the cloth and squares of gauze from the first-aid box onto the entry and exit wounds on the front and back of Liam’s leg, before he started to wind the one roll of bandage from the first-aid box around and around to provide adequate pressure. He straightened and put his hands on the small of his back to push at the cramp that had settled in his lower back. “We’ll have to keep an eye on him for colour changes which would mean that I have bandaged it too tightly.”

Lydia nodded. Her eyes scanned the road around them. Through the devastation of the wreck in the middle of the road, she could see only a couple of people wandering around aimlessly.

She looked worried when she looked back at Shaun. “How long are we going to have to wait for him to wake up?”

CONTINUE READING