I am new to the writing game, or at least to actually showing people what I have written. I am largely inspired by the rugged natural beauty of my homeland Aotearoa New Zealand, and what might be lurking in the wilds...
2400 RPM
by
Joseph Bonnett
“No one believed me, and then it happened again.”
“Who didn’t believe you?”
“After the first time, I radioed Calumn, the foreman. I said the mulcher started up, but there was no one around. Because Calumn and these other guys were way back up the path, I thought they might be messing with me.”
“What did Calumn say?”
“I don’t remember exactly. But, listen…Kaleigh, he might as well have said shut the fuck and get on with it. Not his exact words, but you get it”
“And it happened again? You shut the mulcher off but it was turned back on?”
“Not even five minutes later. I was back in the same spot down the slope in the forest, maybe fifteen meters away, and boom…I hear it kick on again. I ran that time, to catch whoever was fucking around. But still…no one there.
“David, I know it’s difficult, but can you explain what happened next?”
“Well, I’m sure you noticed I’m missing my left arm, and half of my right one too. But, I guess you want details. So the mulcher looks like a big tractor with a compartment in front, it has a high-speed cylinder that pulls in debris and grinds it up. It happened very quickly, but something pushed me and I fell on the cylinder, 200kg of abrasive metal spinning at 2400 rotations a minute. Reckon my face was centimetres away from getting pulled in.”
“You were pushed?”
“Was that conveniently left out before?”
“No, I read the initial report and your statement. But you also said you thought you were alone. You didn’t see anybody. Everyone else in your team was accounted for, and later you said you must have tripped. It was determined to be a workplace accident, and that is why I am here, as an investigator for the regulator.”
“I get that, I think I started to believe I fell for a while, that’s what everyone said must have happened. But I’m telling you, something pushed me from behind, hard enough to knock me down.”
***
Kaleigh left the hospital and drove to the accident scene for the second time that day. She slowed as the road turned to gravel and began to wind up the hill. In the distance, scaffolding and foundations sat atop hilltop peaks in various stages of construction. Brand new playgrounds for billionaires, slowly slicing through the previously untouched forest.
She pulled into a dirt driveway and parked by a small portacom building. As she walked along the muddy dirt track into the forest, grey afternoon skies disappeared as the canopy above thickened and consumed any remaining daylight. She reconsidered and looked back towards the car, but carried on.
The mulcher stood exactly where it had been. Coppery blood stained the yellow paint in parts. Kaleigh circled the vehicle and contemplated industrial dismemberment. She tried the door. It was locked. She felt her pocket for the keys entrusted to her for the investigation.
A scratching sound stopped her, something sharp on metal on the other side of the mulcher, it travelled across the vehicle from right to left and the shrill timbre intensified before it stopped. She stood frozen. Seconds later two loud thuds turned into a clambering scrape as a small head appeared through the passenger window on the other side. The obscured figure raised its right hand and slammed it into the window cracking the glass.
Kaleigh dropped the keys and turned to run to her car but a figure hunched in the shadows up the path forced her to turn and run into the forest. She ran hard and for a long time, until the forest became dense and scraped at her face and body. Until the cold air was burning her lungs. Until the downward slope deceived her and she fell, slipping down an embankment and hard into a fallen tree.
She crawled into a space under the dead tree and spoke to a god long forgotten who did not reciprocate. She felt her pockets but her phone was gone. Above, something big moved. She crawled deeper into cover and hid.
She left the tree, eventually. The blackness softened as her eyes adjusted and she continued with discrete steps. She let the ebbs and flows of the growth guide her, taking the path of least resistance. Mature trees creaked and groaned in disapproval and the wild weeds of the forest floor whispered to each other of her presence. Above her, the canopy had its own language. Something was moving. The noises fired intermittently from all directions.
Light. Not much, but the sky opened up ahead and provided passage for the moon and stars to show the way. A large silhouette lay in the distance and gradually formed the shape of a large piece of machinery. She was back at the clearing.
She ran for the road. The details of the mulcher came into focus and then the blinding lights of the machine turned on and swallowed everything around her. The noise came next, the engine and then the rotor, the sound of hungry spinning metal from a machine she knew harboured no friend.
To her right something scuttled away into the growth. Two legs, the size of a chimpanzee. But it moved smoothly. More human-like than ape? Somewhere in between.
A searing pain tore through the back of her left calf and dropped her. And then she was dragged, screaming. The pressure on her legs suggested multiple hands and the kicking only sunk the claws deeper.
She was turned around and the light illuminated the forest beyond and the noise of the mulcher behind her got louder. She raised her chin and saw a figure, skin like rotted bark, green and brown and wet, long arms and large hands, and a small bat-like face that presented oversized teeth from its jaws. A pair of solid white eyes watched as she was tossed into 200kg of abrasive metal, spinning at 2400 rotations a minute.