home

search

6. One appears, other disappears

  Something was wrong. When they stopped to rest and consult on their further route, Pope suggested that they take a shortcut to Novi Sad over a small bridge, which would lead them to diagonally over area of Srem and then straight to main Danube bridge to Novi Sad. However, that "shortcut" already lengthened their journey by an hour, and there was absolutely no indication that they were near any named town or place that could show them where they were on the map. Although the van seemed to be confidently going in front of Mariana's car, as if they knew exactly where they were going, Mickey was increasingly worried that they were lost. The van was going in that particular direction because there were no other roads or pathways. If they had taken the standard route, they would have already crossed over Fruska Gora hill, and be on sure way to Novi Sad. But not only was Fruska Gora hills nowhere in sight, but they could not even identify where they were. There was no any signs or town names anywhere. Only once did they pass a sign with the name of the place, but they couldn't find it on the map. Now very worried, Mickey checked the car's fuel tank and was relieved to see that it was full. Suddenly the van slowed down and stopped on the side of the road. Mickey could see Dick waving his arms helplessly, and when Pope got out of the van, it was clear the two were arguing.

  “We'll find a local and ask them for directions,” Pope suggested, trying to sound reasonable.

  "What local? For kilometers I didn’t see a living soul around, as if we fell into a black hole! And who are you going to ask at three in the morning?"

  Mariana stopped the car behind the van and they also got out. Although it was summer, the air in this place was very fresh and the landscape seemed unusually uninhabited and desolate. In front of them and behind them was a rough, unregulated road, surrounded by forest at both sides. Darkness was pressing all around them, nothing to see behind or before them on the road.

  "I'm tired of driving this junk!" Dick was angry "We've been rehearsing since this morning, we had a gig that lasted several hours, I'm tired and I haven't had lunch nor dinner! I am tired! What will we do if the van breaks down, or if we run out of gas.'

  "I didn't bring my glasses, I can’t drive, sorry," said Pope, taking a bag out of the trunk.

  He threw a bag to Dick "you have sandwiches and orange juice inside. Help yourself, we'll take a break here.''

  Dick was pissed, but it was clear that food cheered him up. The others weren't too upset. During their gigs, they had traveled in their van all over Serbia, and regional countries like Croatia, Macedonia, even Slovenia, Greece and Bulgaria, so it seemed too comical that after all those journeys, they could get lost in Srem, which is maybe 30 km from Novi Sad where all of them lived. The guys let Mariana choose a sandwich and gave her orange juice. She chatted with them seemingly quite casually and relaxed as if they had known each other forever, skillfully finding topics that may be interesting to all of them. Bentley, or self-proclaimed Mickey, was gently stroking her back with his hand under her shirt, thinking, and he was very wrong about that, that no one could see that. While they were discussing why comic books and horror novels are not junk, but quality reading, Mariana suddenly turned pale. The boys turned in the direction of her gaze, and Dick jumped up on his feet.

  "The car, the car is coming! Finally someone alive in this wasteland!” they shouted and started waving their hands to the car passengers that were driving towards them. They couldn’t still see inside the car, as the headlights were blinding them. Pope and Mickey were still waving, when they noticed Mariana's expression. She was still sitting down, pale as a ghost.

  “What's wrong with you?” Mickey asked and sat down next to her.

  "White Yugo. It's a white Yugo," she said frantically staring into the darkness from where a car was coming, now much closer to them.

  "Yes, I'd say it's a Yugo," he said, holding her around the waist in attempt to comfort her, "You weren't expecting a Lamborghini here, were you?" he added jokingly, but was visibly confused by expression on her face, which showed increasing terror as the white Yugo got closer.

  "What's the matter with you?" He asked, while Pope and Dick looked at her, but they didn't stop waving at the ghost car.

  "It's the car. That's the car in which I saw that monster, that mutant... white Yugo..."

  "Well, we'll see if that’s true soon enough." Pope jumped in front of the car, even though it seemed that the driver had no intention of stopping. But it was slowing down. Mariana hold on to Mickey searching for comfort. The ghost car suddenly stood in front of Pope's large figure, without turning off the engine or the headlights, as if waiting for the intruder to move away before continuing on its way. This seemed to last forever. Pope was feeling his skin crawl. The dark figure of the person behind the wheel sat completely motionless, as if they were dead. For a while they all stood motionless, Pope, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car, Dick, standing a little to the side of the road and a couple holding each other behind him. Headlights faded and turned off, but before the driver was fully visible, their body collapsed onto the wheel. Pope hurried to open the driver’s door of the white car.

  "There's a girl inside," he said cautiously checking her head, "It doesn't look good. She is bleeding."

  "Be careful how you move her!" shouted hypochondriac Dick, who was already running towards the car "She could’ve hurt her spine!"

  "Yeah, we'll definitely be able to help her here, if her spine is broken" Pope grunted ironically pulling the body out of the car, as gently as he could "What are you all just standing there, give me a blanket!"

  "I've said so many times we need a cell phone that was too expensive for you!" And Bentley didn't want to be ‘always available’, he wanted to be independent and elusive!"

  "I have a phone but there is no signal, and even if there was, where are we?” Mariana was looking at her useless little phone.

  They laid the girl on the blanket and Mickey left Mariana and sat next to the unknown girl who lay motionless between them. Pope was right. She lost blood, and a lot. There was blood on her face, forehead and a rather large blood stain on her stomach. Her skin was pale and cold and beaded with sweat. It looked like she was in shock.

  "We need the help of a doctor and now! Mariana, give me your phone! No signal? What the hell is this, bad horror movie?” Pope took the girl's wrist in his hand in an attempt to find a pulse and leaned his head against her chest listening. Dick was obviously panicking and was also completely useless. He walked in a circles around them and repeated with terror in his voice: "What will we do if she is dead? What should we do if we need urgent medical help? What should we do if she dies here with us? If we make a mistake and she dies because of us?'

  Mariana, still looking very pale, was looking at her phone, but there was not a single line of signal. She tossed the phone to Pope and ran towards the ghost white car and opened the back door. There was no one in the car. No one except the girl, who was lying motionless on a blanket next to her dead car. Mariana opened her own car and after some rummaging in the back seat, found an embarrassingly old but still functional first aid kit. She knelt down next to Pope who was still holding the girl's hand and listening to her breathing.

  "She's alive, but I don't know how bad it is. She looks like she's in shock and I can't tell if she's hurt and how badly," he concluded. He carefully poured water on a piece of cotton and began to wipe the blood on girl's face. She had a deep cut on her forehead, maybe an inch from the hairline. Mariana cautiously lifted the girl's shirt from her bloody belly. The smell of blood made her sick, and from the sound of the bloody cloth peeling off the body she wanted to scream.

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  Pope looked worried, and she quickly turned her head away from the sight. The wound was there, a nasty and gaping cut, like a knife cut, and there was still a trickle of blood and the occasional bloody blister coming out of it. Dick, who was standing on the side, much farther from there than the others, as pale as a ghost, managed to look almost worse than the injured girl.

  “Bentley, Mariana, I'm going to need your help.” Pope looked towards Dick and immediately wrote him off as unusable. The drummer had a fear of the sight of blood and everyone already knew that. They found few bottles of water and a bottle of homemade brandy, which by sheer luck the host of the "Stella" tavern made them take as a present, took out all the bandages and towels they could find, and then Pope started to work. He cleaned the cuts, of which there were several minor and two serious ones, disinfected them with brandy and carefully joined the edges of the cuts so that they would bleed less and heal better. Bentley found pins, safety pins and strong thread in the van, from which they improvised something resembling a sewing kit, so Pope and Mariana stitched up the larger cuts the best they could. By the time they started dressing up the stitched cuts, the girl's shirt and skirt were already turned into dirty and bloody mess, and Mariana and Pope didn't looking much better either. Cleaning, stitching and dressing up the unknown girl's wounds seemed to take forever. While holding the gauze, Mariana at one point quietly said:

  "This was not caused by a car accident. That car is old but completely intact. Look at how the cuts are irregular and they look like they were inflicted by maybe a knife. I don't like this.''

  “You think she was attacked?” suggested Mickey.

  "And what if... she was attacked by that being I saw in this car? That deformed creature? What if that thing is somewhere nearby?'

  At that moment, the injured girl suddenly opened her eyes and screamed in terror: "Sergei! Where is he? Sergei?!"

  After that, she lost consciousness again, but at least she started to look a bit better. She didn't shiver as much anymore and her skin was warmer. Pope covered the wounded girl with a blanket. After he graduated from medical high school and even managed to finish first year of Medical college. He worked as male nurse in a military hospital, so he did have practice in minor treatments. Tending the injuries was over now and he wasn't sure he knew what to do. They didn't know where they were, they didn't have an endless supply of gas, and they didn't have a signal to call for help. Bentley was quite calm and stable and nice to work with, but Dick was a liability. Mariana didn't make a particularly positive impression on him at first, especially when she panicked about the crab-like monster she allegedly saw in this spooky white car. He didn't care what kind of girl Bentley dated, as long as it didn't affect their band, but he also didn't like someone unpredictable and unstable accompanying them to gigs, and she seemed like that kind of person. However, after she has calmed down in record time and proved very helpful while tending to a wounded unknown girl, he changed his mind about Mariana. When they first met her at that business gala where they played, she did not leave a particularly favorable impression on Pope. She was very nervous, too perky and too childish and chatty for his taste. On the other hand, Bentley went crazy when he saw her. He didn't calm down until he got to know her, and his immediate connection with that girl surprised both Dick and Pope.

  When it comes to girls, Bentley was more of a prey than a hunter. He was quite withdrawn and unapproachable and almost asocial. The only exception he made to his withdrawn and unapproachable nature was when he approached Dick and Pope, while they were still in the band "Analytic", and proposed that they form their own group. Music has always been Bentley's greatest passion, and if he hadn't at that moment forgot his nature and didn’t approach the guys from "Analytic", he would hardly have had a new opportunity that would have been so good. And he believed in positive vibrations. He claimed that he felt the connection as soon as he saw Pope and Dick and heard their concert. Even his stubbornly aloof nature could not resist such a challenge. Otherwise, under normal circumstances, it was difficult to elicit action from him or an attempt to start something on his own initiative. Girls approached him rarely, because he did not show the initiative to get to know them, nor did he approach them himself. The few extremely aggressive ones who managed to win him over for a while, left him when they got annoyed enough by his passive personality or when they found him too weird for them to handle. Or they would simply got tired of walking aimlessly around the city for hours with him, watching him practice keyboards for hours, as if she doesn’t exist, while Pope was tuning his guitar and practiced his voice, and Dick was practicing on his drums. Or the lack of moments when they could be alone with him, because his roommates were seemingly always at home. In short, he wasn’t even trying. Pope wondered if Bentley was interested in women at all, and the jokes between the three of them became frequent.

  Until Mariana appeared with her big boobs, her cleavage and her black curls. She did not seem at all like someone Bentley would like. Pope always imagined Bentley's ideal girl as an ethereal, thin, blonde and quiet, almost non-existent tiny creature, tender and fragile. That would be an almost asexual girl, who is more of a spiritual than physical. This Mariana was very physical and not at all ethereal, and she had more sex appeal than she knew how to use. It was a big surprise for Pope when he saw his friend being so comfortable with this girl, whom he didn't even know at the time, and he was even more surprised when, not long after, he ran into those two on the balcony next to the kitchen of the restaurant with his head firmly buried into her breasts. while she was sitting on his lap. Pope was surprised to realize that Bentley really warmed up to her a lot, considering he had just met her. To be honest, Pope didn't expect her to actually come to that gig as she had promised, but the fact that she did, did a lot to improve the impression she made on him. The girl was warm, sweet and she was really interested in Bentley, and that was a lot. He began to suspect that maybe Bentley is not so much reserved when it comes to girls, as he is actually knows what he exactly wants and is looking for in a partner. And apparently he recognized that in her. Between the two, the chemistry was so strong that it was almost visible to the naked eye. Now they were standing very close to each other and Pope heard them talking.

  "You said it was a crab-like creature with small, stubby limbs? Then how could he hurt a girl like this? Such cuts could be caused by a large knife or machete. How would such creature swing?"

  “What you're saying makes sense, but I wonder…did she know she wasn't alone in the car? Did she have other companions? Anyway, who is Sergei?'

  "Listen to me, you said you saw a human face. So, if it was a man, then maybe he was unfortunate person with deformity. He doesn't have to be a criminal just because he doesn't have a standard body shape. Maybe he's a seriously ill or had an accident, maybe he is the girl's brother or cousin, and maybe they've both been attacked. Something terrible could have happened to that guy. We should find him. No, we have to find him!” he was all into in his imagined role of a hero.

  "What disease makes you grow a shell around your whole body? Look, maybe I didn't see it well, but the guy had a shell, like a crab or a turtle, a real hard shell! Have you ever seen such a deformity?"

  "There are various deformities, some really very strange. I've seen all sorts of things on the Discovery Channel or internet. You wouldn't believe how many variations there can happen in body structure. They are all people, regardless of their visible differences. Then why not the shell? After all, maybe it wasn't a shell. Maybe it was medical aid like... I don’t know...some cast... and he wears it because of his illness, for protection."

  "She's real," Mariana said stubbornly, and Mickey dramatically threw up his arms up stepping out of further discussion.

  "Where's Dick?" he asked suddenly. All three of them looked around.

  "He got sick. The sight of the blood makes him sick. It has always been that way. Maybe he went a little further from here?” said Pope.

  "Gone where? There is nothing around us. Just this old road and the woods on both sides. If it weren't for the full moon, you wouldn't be able to see a finger in front of your face." Having said that, Mariana got up and walked around looking inside of all cars and a van, just in case. Pope opened the back of a van. Inside was crammed up their equipment, extra props, but no Dick. Mariana's red car was also empty. No one still dared to approach the White Yugo car, even though they didn't want to admit that they are afraid of it.

  “Maybe he's gone deeper into the woods to…pee?” Mickey suggested.

  "I don't like this," Mariana said, but she still looked calm. Wounded girl on the blanket was still unconscious, her wavy light brown hair scattered around her head and on the surrounding grass. Her breathing was steady but quiet and she still looked too pale. She wasn't waking up. Mariana could not be sure how serious were those injuries. Pope didn’t think it was that bad, but he was worried about her state of shock, as if she saw something truly horrible. He volunteered to stay to look after the injured girl, while Mickey and Mariana went to search the area looking for the missing drummer. But he was nowhere to be found.

Recommended Popular Novels