Art Pact 54


Cruising down the highway the car flashed blinding glints of light into the far mountains, from where the silent watchers kept their vigil. Several of the shapes flinched whenever the light leapt up at them, protecting their unseen eyes, but others maintained their ceaseless stares. Sometimes one or the other even of those more stoic of the forms shuffled in place, but there were those that might as well have been stones trapped at the top of the bluff, great silent monoliths that had stood since the dawn of time and would be there still when the occupants of the car were long dead, the car itself nothing but iron dust, the civilisation that had built the one and birthed the others nothign more than a footnote in the great chronicles of earth written by some future archaeologist.

In the car itself, thoughts were strictly short-term. In the passenger seat sat a gruff young man, nursing a six-day beard that he was forced to guard as much from the criticism of his fellow travellers as from his morning urge to unpack his trimmer. Behind him was an older man with a greyer, thinner, but more impressive looking beard that had benefitted from a year without a razor and which was mature enough to suffer no adverse comment from the other two occupants of the car - a youth of fourteen, and a woman in her mid-twenties who was sat in the driver's seat, working the accelerator with her right foot and holding the wheel in place with her elevated right knee.

"Are you going to do that all the way down the road?" asked the teenager. One finger was hooked under the headband of an old pair of headphones, hoisting the speaker away from his right ear. From the lurid orange foam that covered it a stream of invective backed by bass beats pulsed into the car's passenger compartment, causing the older man to surreptitiously move his right hand up to cover his ear. "I said, are you going to do that all the way down the road? Is she going to do that the whole way?" he repeated, opening up his request as an imprecation to the rest of the passengers. When the others ignored him, he blew out a long annoyed sigh, shrugged wildly, and let the earphone snap back into its appointed place. The driver looked around at the others, first to the young man in the passenger seat, then to the older man in the back, and in turn rolled her eyes within sight of each of them. Neither responded.

"We've got about two hours to go," she reported, after a short silence. "Two hours. Maybe two and a half. Or maybe less, maybe if we find a gas station I can take us off the economy cruise and we can burn up a bit." No-one replied. "Anyway, two hours I guess."

"If she can do that," the teenager said, this time with both earphones in place, "surely I could - I mean, she's not even paying attention. Why can't I drive? I'll be safer, safer than steering with my damn legs. What if a cop catches us?"

"What if?" asked the young man from the front. "What are we going to say if he catches us when you're driving? At least she's old enough to drive. When we see the cop she can put her hands on the wheel in about half a second. How quick do you think you could scramble into the backseat without crashing the car in the process?"

"I don't know - let me give it a try and we'll find out."

"Longer than half a second," the young man said. He scratched at the light fuzz at the point at which his neck met his jaw, the spotted the woman watching him. She was smiling, and in return he snarled and quickly jerked his hand away from his face.

"Give it up," she said.

"Not until I've won."

"Fine, your funeral. I get itchy just thinking about it. It must be like thousands of little spiders crawling across your face."

"It's fine," he said, although his face twitched a couple of times and he looked somewhat strained.

"Sure, of course."

"Leave him alone," the older man called from the back seat. "He can't help it."

"I don't need your help."

"Fine, then - what she said. Your funeral."

As he said this, far away on the bluff, a collective shiver ran through the dark watchers. One of the larger ones detached itself from the group and began to move towards the cliff edge.

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