Free The Raft: A Novel by Fred Strydom

district of the town and the tint on the windscreen adjusted to the direct glare of the sun. He pulled up to a traffic light and stopped. A few other AVs pulled up beside him. They waited together for the lights to change.
    Kayle did a quick mental review of his upcoming lecture, “Secular Voices in Ancient Israel.”
    His thoughts were interrupted by an odd sensation building inside his head. He blinked his eyes hard and forced a yawn. It was nothing. Perhaps he hadn’t had enough water to drink. Perhaps he’d eaten something that hadn’t agreed with him …
    The sides of the streets were busier now, families, young stragglers, old couples walking their designer dogs: the blood of human life was pumping through the concrete veins of the town. On the radio, the newswoman was still talking, her voice distorted.
    Kayle switched it off.
    He touched the side of his head. He was feeling dizzy and the first pangs of a headache were creeping in, not so much a pain as an aching heaviness. He must be coming down with something. Or perhaps it was stress—“The Silent Killer” that the posters in the doctor’s office warned against. After all, there was tension at home, he’d been having peculiar dreams. Perhaps he was having some kind of psychosomatic—
    s c r e e e e e e e e e c h
    It rang through his ears, the sound of two metal plates being scraped against each other. Kayle shook his head and shut his eyes, trying to force the sound back to the cruel place it had come from.
    This isn’t normal. This isn’t right.
    His hands clutched the wheel. He opened his eyes. The large woman in the vehicle to his right was grabbing her face, shaking her head. The same symptoms as his. No. That doesn’t make sense. It was just a coincidence.
    He looked to his left. The driver in the next lane was forcing two fists into the temples of his head like the clamps of a wood-shop vice.
    The traffic lights were green, but nobody moved. People on the sides of the road had stopped. Families, stragglers, old couples—everyone suspended in a state of agony. Some were leaning against store walls, clutching their skulls. Some were bent over, throwing up on the pavement.
    Kayle didn’t understand. The noise, the dizziness, was originating from inside his brain. So how could they all be hearing and feeling the same thing? He tried to hold the thought but the screech in his head was intensifying and his eyes were becoming frighteningly sensitive to the harsh morning sun. Sunlight struck him like an angry god, cutting through his retinas, reaching in to ruin him with a single touch.
    Kayle sat immobile now, completely paralysed by the sound and the light and the aching heaviness. His last rational thought before blacking out was of his son and his wife. Were they in a similar state, wherever they were? Would he ever see them again?
    A man nobody on earth knew opened his eyes. He was sitting behind the wheel of a car. At first he did not know enough to register he’d awoken at all, only that there was light pouring into his head. A wall of light and a wave of sounds that eventually organised itself into shapes and allowed him his first bit of sense.
    He was looking through a windscreen. The windscreen of a car. Beyond, smoke rose and spread, stretching up from the crumpled bonnets of two wrecked vehicles.
    The man closed his eyes, calming himself in the darkness. He knew he could not keep them closed. He would have to open them again.
    When he did, the world was clearer, but not his understanding. Gradually, a thought entered, and then another that tried to say the same thing, until he became aware of one thing only: Wrong.
    Everything was wrong.
    He held out his trembling hands but did not know who they belonged to, where the scar on the back of his knuckle came from, how many years had weathered his skin. He fixed his eyes on the two cars that had smashed into each other. They were smoking and steaming as if they had engaged in some violent kiss