Free The New Weird by Jeff VanderMeer, Ann VanderMeer Page A

won't drive, I will."
    Mick got out of the car and crossed in front of it, glancing up the track as he did so. There was a moment's hesitation, no more than a moment's, when his eyes flickered with disbelief, before he turned towards the windscreen, his face even paler than it had been previously and said: "Jesus Christ." in a voice that was thick with suppressed nausea.
    His lover was still sitting behind the wheel, his head in his hands, trying to blot out memories.
    "Judd."
    Judd looked up, slowly. Mick was staring at him like a wildman, his face shining with a sudden, icy sweat. Judd looked past him. A few meters ahead the track had mysteriously darkened, as a tide edged towards the car, a thick, deep tide of blood. Judd's reason twisted and turned to make any other sense of the sight than that inevitable conclusion. But there was no saner explanation. It was blood, in unendurable abundance, blood without end -
    And now, in the breeze, there was the flavor of freshly-opened carcasses: the smell out of the depths of the human body, part sweet, part savory.
    Mick stumbled back to the passenger's side of the VW and fumbled weakly at the handle. The door opened suddenly and he lurched inside, his eyes glazed.
    "Back up," he said.
    Judd reached for the ignition. The tide of blood was already sloshing against the front wheels. Ahead, the world had been painted red.
    "Drive, for fuck's sake, drive!"
    Judd was making no attempt to start the car.
    "We must look," he said, without conviction, "we have to."
    "We don't have to do anything," said Mick, "but get the hell out of here. It's not our business."
    "Plane crash ― "
    "There's no smoke."
    "Those are human voices."
    Mick's instinct was to leave well enough alone. He could read about the tragedy in a newspaper ― he could see the pictures tomorrow when they were grey and grainy. Today it was too fresh, too unpredictable -
    Anything could be at the end of that track, bleeding -
    "We must ― "
    Judd started the car, while beside him Mick began to moan quietly. The VW began to edge forward, nosing through the river of blood, its wheels spinning in the queasy, foaming tide.
    "No," said Mick, very quietly, "please, no."
    "We must," was Judd's reply. "We must. We must."

    Only a few yards away the surviving city of Popolac was recovering from its first convulsions. It stared, with a thousand eyes, at the ruins of its ritual enemy, now spread in a tangle of rope and bodies over the impacted ground, shattered forever. Popolac staggered back from the sight, its vast legs flattening the forest that bounded the stamping-ground, its arms flailing the air. But it kept its balance, even as a common insanity, woken by the horror at its feet, surged through its sinews and curdled its brain. The order went out: the body thrashed and twisted and turned from the grisly carpet of Podujevo, and fled into the hills.
    As it headed into oblivion, its towering form passed between the car and the sun, throwing its cold shadow over the bloody road. Mick saw nothing through his tears, and Judd, his eyes narrowed against the sight he feared seeing around the next bend, only dimly registered that something had blotted the light for a minute. A cloud, perhaps. A flock of birds.
    Had he looked up at that moment, just stolen a glance out towards the northeast, he would have seen Popolac's head, the vast, swarming head of a maddened city, disappearing below his line of vision, as it marched into the hills. He would have known that this territory was beyond his comprehension; and that there was no healing to be done in this corner of Hell. But he didn't see the city, and he and Mick's last turning-point had passed. From now on, like Popolac and its dead twin, they were lost to sanity, and to all hope of life.

    They rounded the bend, and the ruins of Podujevo came into sight.
    Their domesticated imaginations had never conceived of a sight so unspeakably brutal.
    Perhaps in the battlefields of Europe as many