Eyes on the Side

hunter and hunted

Dear New Readers: Welcome to Age of Aquarius. The fiction here is dark, it’s scary, you might even call it horror.

I occasionally include content warnings, when the material is especially sensitive and if I don’t think the warning will spoil everything. This particular story contains detailed descriptions of an accident, physical injuries, blood and gore. If you prefer a drier experience, maybe check out some of my other stories.

I appreciate you being here and I never want to ruin your day. Unless you’re into that. In which case, on with the show.

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Photo by Pétrin Express on Unsplash

Alex’s train leapt off its rails like a person fleeing a rattlesnake on a desert path.

Derailment, Alex thought, when he first felt himself rising out of his seat against his will. The train shrieked and burst and exploded off the rails at fifty miles per hour, arcing dozens of feet into the air before driving deeply into the earth.

The car he was in, second to last, was dragged and twisted, torn from gravity’s hold by the torque of the flying steel ahead and the heavy engine in its spasmodic death jump.

The opposite side of his car was peeled open, a tin can with its jagged lid half off, and Alex felt the climate controlled air sucked out into oblivion.

Centrifugal, he thought, when he slammed against the window and was held there while his side of the car skidded across its rocky rail bed.

As the train corkscrewed, the window against which Alex was pressed vaporized, sending his face and shoulder grinding against the gravelly ground, while the rocks and glass and splintered wood of the rail ties surged in through the place where the window used to be.

Alex’s left cheek and eyelid were torn from his skull and smeared on the grey rocks, a slash of red paint across a cold canvas.

Abraded, he thought, unable to quite catch up.

The spark-flying screeching metal screams of the train went on for so long, it seemed it would never stop. But it did run out of momentum eventually, and there was a brief quiet while Alex assessed his new reality.

The window—that only a second ago had framed a spray of low green vegetation rushing by in a blur—was gone. Now the grass was the sky. Now a pearly expanse of winter clouds filled Alex’s right periphery, and a grinding cold grit pressed into his bare left cheekbone. Now his left eye felt loose and free, a sensation that put ice in his belly.

He couldn’t quite tell if he was indoors or out— the floor rose vertically into the sky, the seats across the aisle stacked up on their sides like dominoes. Alex heard the clicking of hot engine parts, something dripping, a rush of escaping steam. Then an orchestra of human suffering.

“Help! Somebody please help me!”

“My babyyyy!”

“Does anyone have a phone?”

“Can someone help me? I’m hurt!”

“Over here! Please!”

Alex heard wails that slid along the fuzzy border between human and animal. These he felt squirming across his skin, heavy with dread and slimy with fear. He realized a peculiar sound was coming from his own mouth.

Keening, he thought, and the world went dark.

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“Hello?” He heard a dry whisper behind his head. “Can you hear me?”

The papery voice was calm and eerie. It sounded resigned.

“Ye—” Alex stopped to clear his throat. He was struggling to enunciate with his ruined jaw. “Yeh,” he managed.

“Do you think you can help me? I’m — I don’t know. I’m stuck.”

“Mmmh,” was all he could manage. He felt something bubbling in his voice box.

“My name is Miriam. I’m— I think I might be dying.”

“Uh-Unh,” Alex forced himself to cough out. The effort shot lightning through his lungs. Please, he thought. Don’t tell me.

Miriam didn’t respond. Her lungs rustled when she breathed. It made him think of his amber porch light, a moth trapped inside the glass, wings tapping and sliding against a prison it couldn’t perceive.

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Alex rolled in and out of consciousness.

When he was able to open his eyes, he saw ahead of him the back of a train seat tipped on its side, green vinyl against the black forest in the distance. Between him and the seat was a jumble of rocks, earth and glass.

He was terrified to lift his head, convinced if he did he would fully divorce from his mangled left eye. So he searched with the right eye only, straining it to the edge of its socket, looking for information.

He saw his book of crossword puzzles about a foot away, flipped open to the sky, its black and white squares a strange affront to his situation. Perfect empty geometry in a wrecked place that abhorred straight lines and clean white expanses.

His teeth, he learned, were broken shards. He probed the inside of his coppery mouth with his tongue and found he could taste the bloody soil and chunky stones upon which his half-bare skull rested.

He could move his top arm, and with it he gingerly patted his chest and midsection, feeling for wetness, holes, his own guts slithering out. But his torso was intact.

The state of his legs was a mystery, however, and this scared him even more than his eye. He couldn’t feel them, couldn’t move them, couldn’t reach far enough past his hip to find out why. He sensed there was a massive weight pressing down on them, but he felt no pain, and that was the worst news of all.

“Someone will come for us,” Miriam said, and he was startled to remember there was another person with him. He couldn’t tell if it was a question.

“Can you tell me your name? Or maybe I can guess.” She continued.

Alex took a breath in and the sound was like sucking milk through a straw. On his exhale he sputtered “Ahh-ecks. Ahh-ecks.”

“Ahhh…Al… Alex?”

“Ya,” he responded, and he started to cry, overcome at being seen in this loneliest moment.

“That was easy.”

He choked but it felt like laughing.

“Alex, I want you to know that the back of your head is ok,” he could hear the smile in her voice. “The back of your head looks great as a matter of fact.”

Alex raised his free arm and raked his fingers through his short hair, his scalp blessedly dry and unbroken. He was flooded with warm gratitude for Miriam, for the world, for every breath that gurgled in and out of him. He might survive this after all.

He bargained immediately with a god he didn’t quite believe in, Please let me live! Let me see one more day. I don’t even need legs, you can take them.

Miriam can push my wheelchair, he thought, surprising himself, and he knew that no one would ever understand them like they understood each other in this moment. They had to live— they were bound to each other. Trauma-bonded, he thought.

He waited for her to say something, anything, that thin rustling voice keeping him tethered to the living. He wanted her to talk to him all night.

—night? He didn’t know how long they had been there, but the sky had dimmed considerably. He noticed a pinprick of light in the gloaming.

The Evening Star, he thought. It must have been an hour already. Where are the rescuers? Why aren’t they here yet? The night pushed in around him. He wondered if Miriam could still see his head.

And that’s when the chewing started.

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Alex heard a high pitched scream that cut off abruptly, silenced at the source like pinched air escaping a balloon. It was different than the cacophony of moaning; this was a sudden scream, powered by atavistic terror. He felt his pulse rise, and then a new wetness as fresh blood leaked from his ruined face.

The choked cry gave way to the most horrible sound he had ever heard. A slurping crunching noise straight out of a nature documentary—crocodiles grabbing a juicy musk ox by the thigh, lions with blood red jowls licking strings of hot meat from their muzzles— a sound he recognized at once in the most primitive part of his brain.

Predation, he thought, and he swallowed the wad of blood that had gathered in his throat. He strained his neck, panic rolling his good eye for a glimpse of movement. A bear? A wolf? What lives in these woods?

“Ear-ee-uh?” His best attempt.

“I’m here,” she whispered. “Quiet.” Alex could hear her eyes widen.

He heard the snap of bones, the pop of cartilage, the throaty grunt of a meal that rushes in hot and satisfying. Every crunch sent him into himself, flinching from the sound. An ancient thirst quenched by a bonanza of soft stuck bodies.

Slaked, Alex thought, even though he didn’t want to.

He wished for eyes on the side of his head— prey’s eyes, designed for a wider field of view, designed to survive. Humans have predators’ eyes. Eyes designed for hunting, not evading.

A lie evolution tells, putting our eyes in the front, he thought.

Then he remembered his own left eye, its state unknown. He didn’t want eyes on the side. He wanted his own eyes, snug in their sockets.

“Are you there?” Miriam’s whisper was so close to the back of his head that he thought he felt her breath.

“Mmm-hmm,” he responded, more air than voice.

“I’m scared.” Emotion cracked her whisper. He wondered which of them was closer to the finish line. He didn’t want to be alone.

He tuned his ears to the sound of feet— or claws or hooves or paws— on the gravel, but no footsteps came. Instead, into the still air floated the scent of animal fur, a matted, earthy, wet dog smell. Alex held his breath.

Another person shrieked, this one closer. Miriam gasped and he silently begged her to stay quiet. His shoulders shook, and the adrenaline surge made him wonder for a moment if he could throw off whatever was pinning his legs. Maybe even save both of them.

The scream was strangled, silenced by the gurgling of a throat pulled away from a body, a sound he didn’t think he could have identified in a million years, until he did. Fear froze him in place, just exactly like a deer on the highway. Tears rolled from his good eye, dripping along the side of his nose.

And then, reflected on the train’s shiny wreckage, a miracle. A red light and then a blue. Silent flashing back and forth, red and blue, red and blue. No screeching sirens, no crackle of walkie talkies, but someone was there at last.

The Cavalry, Alex thought, and a new energy pulsed through him. All he had to do was stay alive and someone would save him. He wanted to scream over here! Help! I’m alive!

—We’re alive! He corrected, because he could never leave Miriam. He felt desperate to hear her voice again.

But he thought better of it. The rescuers were still too far away to hear them, but the beast was close. All they could do was wait in the dark, rabbits in a trap, praying to be found and praying to stay hidden.

Soon he became aware of a narrow whistling noise, a miserable squeak from his dripping sinuses, every time he exhaled. Was I making that sound all along? he wondered, trying to slow his breath. But the terror turned his inhales to ragged hiccups. His injuries announced him, the weakest in the herd.

Alex’s good eye darted around in the front, unable to gather any useful information. Unable to see what was coming, unable to see even Miriam, the love of his life stuck behind him for eternity. He saw only the back of a sideways train seat, green vinyl against the black forest. His heart felt like it would explode.

He heard a tiny cough behind him.

I’m sorry Miriam. I’m so sorry, his breath whistled, gurgled and wheezed.

Then he was hit with a humid cloud of the most wretched stench he could imagine. Ionized salt, the electric tang of iron, a dank, mushroomy, moldy smell. Broken, yellowed teeth, a decaying bit of tendon wedged between molars. The breath of a man-eater.

Carnivorous, he thought, and wished he hadn’t.