MORTIS CITY
Alec sighed, staring at the ceiling above his bed. Getting up was becoming more and more difficult, as if his bed was becoming a giant pit of tar sucking Alec’s motivation into itself, to create a fossil of Alec’s former enthusiasm. With a grunt Alec wrenched himself up into a sitting position but kept still, eyes closed, for another few minutes. He listened to the sounds outside his window, holding his breath. He hoped there wasn’t anybody lying in wait outside. You’d think after two months, they would have stopped trying to ambush him.
Alec drudged through his breakfast and shower. He had to force himself to re-dress himself twice. He might be off work on this day, but he didn’t need to go out and be seen in public looking like a hung-over, depressed teenager dealing with an immense volume of hatred from John Q. Public. A hung-over, depressed teenager who couldn’t be bothered to dress with any attention to his wardrobe. This, of course, was exactly what Alec was.
The choice between hiding out at home and going out wasn’t really much of an internal debate for Alec. At home, there was the TV with its news, talk shows, and shows rife with references to the apocalypse. His parents had changed their number five times in 7 weeks, Alec no longer went online.
When Alec stepped outside, he was gratified to see there were no effigies or piles of excrement on the lawn. No knife-wielding would-be attackers. No reporters-
"Alec Kaminski!" the reedy voice came from the shrubbery to Alec’s right. Alec yelped and jumped to the left, colliding with the post of the porch. Slightly dazed, Alec could not decide whether to retreat back inside the house or to flee the premises. The thin, young man (barely) with glasses half the size of his face and skinny jeans who emerged from the shrubbery, yanking on the strap of his camera to free it from a branch reminded Alec of a bug. Maybe a dragonfly, without the wings.
"No comment," Alec told him, recovering sufficiently to shoot the reporter/photojournalist/insectboy a nasty glare. Unfazed, the bug held out a hand. Alec didn’t take it, but when he glanced down he saw that the hand held a business card in it. He deliberately didn’t take it.
"DeShawn Banks, with the Update," the reporter said, pocketing his card after a brief pause. "Just a moment of your time-" Alec made a chopping motion with his hand.
"I said no! No . . . comment ." Alec spun around and walked swiftly down the steps, intent upon making his way towards his bike locked up several blocks away. His last bike, while locked up in back of his house, had been trashed beyond repair.
His car was untouched. No one in Detroit worried anymore about vandalized cars. The risk was too great.
"Why?" DeShawn’s query, simple but plaintive, stopped Alec in his tracks. Over the weeks, various people had asked Alec how he did it, who else was involved, what he did. But no one had asked why. They were too angry, too stunned. Alec didn’t turn around. He couldn’t look DeShawn in the eyes.
"I just wanted to fix my car," Alec said, his voice weary as the steps he took away from the staring journalist.
Alec kept his head down as he shuffled down the sidewalk. He was less likely to be recognized if his face wasn’t easily discernable. But he glanced up often, out of necessity. He knew that while it was far more likely that any car leaving the road and heading up the pavement towards him would not harm him at all, there was still the risk that it would be a solid, existent car with a vengeful driver behind the wheel. So many people blamed him for the deaths of their loved ones. Or the maiming accidents. The injuries. The stress. The list went on.
Alec dealt with enough of his own stress. It’d even gotten him started on drinking heavily, at the age of seventeen. His shoulders and neck were a constant knot of tension, as if the hand of collective resentment and hatred was wrapped firmly around his neck. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the afternoon light flash off something green. He glanced up and saw a Model-T bearing directly down towards where he wavered upon the pavement.
Alec’s body trembled as his heart flung itself frenziedly at his ribcage over and over. Was the car real? It looked and sounded real, but that meant nothing these days. He tried to force his feet to move, to run, to flee, but it was as if his legs had petrified. Likewise for his eyelids; they would not close, would not let Alec shut out the approaching car as it came closer and closer, rattling and roaring. Smoke shot out the rear and from underneath the hood as well, making Alec think of a dragon. A dragon that soon would strike Alec and kill him. The dragon drew even closer and-
Passed through Alec, continuing a few more feet before it abruptly stopped, the entire front caving in with a hideous cacophony of tearing metal and snapping parts. The car must have hit a tree or something similar that no longer stood in that spot, Alec surmised, as he wiped his face with a shaking hand. His legs unlocked, and he fell down onto his knees, inhaling and exhaling forcefully. A ghost car. How Alec hated the bastards.
After a few moments, Alec staggered to his feet. Swaying, he began to move once again, his eyes darting in all directions. He reached his bike without further incident, although he did hear the collision between two 60’s sedans. He didn’t bother to look up and see the aftermath. There wouldn’t be one. The cars would disappear soon after the collision, and Alec had seen the accident already. Twenty or so times.
Alec ran his fingers over the frame of his bike. He had so little motivation these days. Lifting his leg to straddle the bike seemed to require more work than running a marathon wearing cement blocks upon his feet. His life sucked ass, and he was only seventeen. He sighed, and got on his bike. "I just wanted to fix my car," he muttered, as he began pedaling.
The brakes need fixing, Alec decided, probably because he used them so often every time he went out, with the extremely defensive riding he had to do. God damn, but he needed a drink. Gabe at the liquor store wouldn’t start his shift for another couple of hours, though. Alec wandered the streets, trying to stay off the bigger streets and sticking to alleys and side roads. Eventually, he decided to go home to eat something, so he headed back towards the no parking signpost where he would leave his bike.
Perhaps if Alec had returned by a different route. Perhaps if he’d pedaled slower, or faster. Perhaps if deep down within, he wasn’t harboring thoughts of just giving up for once and all. Perhaps . . . it didn’t matter. Alec was coasting along when he saw, again, the phantom green Model-T headed on a course perpendicular to his. In a single day, a car’s demise could be played out a dozen times, easily. During the nights they seemed to occur more often, perhaps because they had, in reality. Nearly everyone slept with earplugs now. Alec felt surprise when a burst of anger welled up within his cor. He was so tired of this, of everything. He gripped his handlebars and began pedaling towards the car.
Too late, he discerned through the reflected sky the face of the driver inside the car. The clothes, the hair, they weren’t of the 30’s. Alec’s entire body went numb, even as he cried out and tried to swerve out of the car’s onrush. As the shock of the impact ran through Alec’s body, he marveled at the ingenuity and hatred behind the driver’s planning. To determine where Alec kept his bike, to discover which ghost car was nearest, and to locate and refurbish an actual match, to trick Alec long enough to kill him. Alec’s weak laughter was inaudible under the sounds of breaking bones, twisting metal, and screeching brakes.
Alec awoke in pain that transcended any possible measurement he’d even been capable of imagining. Nausea rose in his throat, receded, and then spilled forth.
Through a haze, he was vaguely aware of cries, a sponge wiping his face and chin, a sheet removed and replaced. A hand stroked his brow, clearing his hair away from his forehead. A mother-voice murmured to him, "salrrghtAlessyoresaffnao" and then Alec sank back into the folds of oblivion.
Alec dreamed a memory, the memory of how it all started. He’d bought his own car with long-saved cash, a ’76 Thunderbird. It hadn’t been the best of deals, because the car itself needed many parts. Even though these were plentiful in Detroit, the ones needed for a ’76 Thunderbird weren’t cheap, not by a far cry. Fed up with the disproportionate hours his car sat on the driveway compared to the few he spent driving it around, he turned to alternate means. Magic. Deepest magic.
Alec believed that he could adapt some spells to basically restore the Thunderbird. He’d gotten the idea from a late night movie based on a Stephen King book. He’d had to be creative with the interpretation of some of the spells and the ingredients they called for, but in the end, it turned out that Alec was quite adept at working magic. More adept than he’d known at the time.
One particular night Alec had sat inside the complex diagram that took him five hours to draw with chalk (his parents were out of town for the weekend) on the fllor of the garage and spoke the invocations, combined the ingredients, and projected his will into the wooden constrict representing his car. He’d experienced a palpable emanation of power, but when he ran outside, his face full of excitement, he was bitterly disappointed to see no change in his car.
As it turned out, Alec’s spell hadn’t had the exact result he’d hoped for. He’d also performed it in one of the most risky locales possible; Detroit. The essence of the spell had been to restore the spirit of the Thunderbird, but Alec’s natural and innate talent had amplified the force of the magic, increased a million fold by the heart of Detroit; the cars of days gone by. The result: the echo of every single automobile that was now defunct, due to collision, fire, immersion in a body of water, rust, or old age, now manifested itself. In short, Detroit was now heavily infested with car ghosts. They looked solid, and sounded real, so people could not discern the difference between these and actual presently existing cars, except by touch. There was no safe or effective test to determine a car’s physical status by contact, unfortunately.
A rather sinister feature was that some of these cars also had drivers and passengers clearly visible inside. The ghosts of those who had perished with the vehicle. As with any haunting, the car ghosts often re-enacted their demises over and over.
Small wonder that Alec was so reviled by the city of Detroit. In a single night, he’d changed the entire cityscape and put the residents into a constant state of paranoia and fear and tension. Furthermore, the spell showed no signs of abating. Modern cars totaled in accident since the night Alec performed his magic also returned in spirit as phantoms.
It took Alec three weeks to climb out of his medicated stupor. Another three weeks before he was due to released from the hospital. Two days before he was to leave, a stranger slid into the room where Alec slept and stood staring down at the boy for a long while, teeth and fists clenched, rage rising off skin.
Alec woke up completely free of pain. He sat up, and swung his feet over to the side of the bed. He stood up, and looked at his dead body, the head still obscured by a pillow. He glanced over at the departing figure of his killer without much interest. Well. It was over with and he didn’t hurt anymore. He turned to face the wall, and then walked through it.
He ambled along several streets, enjoying the privilege of being able to look around at his environs without fear of drawing unwanted attention or reprisal from passer-bys. He reached out to stroke a parked Dodge Charger, something he would never have dared to do if his hand was solid. His fingers now just dipped beneath the surface of the fiery orange paint. He crossed an intersection against the traffic flow, ignoring the cars that simply phased through him. He laughed, elated at his new freedom.
When the ’02 Mazda squealed around the corner at another intersection several minutes later, Alec paid it no attention as he stepped out in front of it. That’s when he realized that a ghost getting hit by a ghost car was exactly the same as getting hit by a real car in life. Exactly.
Except that while Alec lay in the street, a broken and moaning creature, blood pouring forth from his body but making no stain upon the pavement, there would be no medical assistance coming to his aid.
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