FicWad

Those five words crawled fear along my skin. We had just passed through an invisible wall that separated two worlds. I knew then that I hadn’t truly believed what Ray had been saying, but now I had felt it. We had entered into something new, something different to what I knew. This was not my world anymore. It was theirs. Completely. Even the air seemed different, heavier against my skin.

I sat still unsure of what to do next. The car was motionless, the moment the noise had stopped the car had jolted and then nothing. The engine wasn’t purring anymore, the clock on the dash wasn’t blinking at me. There was nothing. It was as though the car had stroked and died.

Ray seemed unfazed, he was oblivious to anything concerning me or my fears. His entire focus was on what lay outside of the car. A dirt landscape that held things I knew nothing of. This thought would have set me on high alert but my body and my mind were in over load. It was all too much. I was like the car, there was nothing working inside. I should have been more, of what specifically I don’t know just more. More cop. More prepared. More together. But sitting there in that car I was just a scared woman, and I couldn’t shake that feeling. I hadn’t signed up for this shit.

“Ray, what do we do now?” I managed to choke out.

He turned to look at me, his eyes staring at me as though he had only then remembered I was there. His forehead crinkled only slightly as he thought on it.

“We wait, I guess.”

I repeated his words under my breath soaking them in. We wait. Okay we wait. But for what? I opened my mouth to ask but I was already given the answer when I looked passed Ray out the window. In the desert a haze floated atop of the horizon, blurring the ground and sky making it appear as though they fused were together, the colour subtly blending. In the middle a small group of figures grew larger as I watched on. Ray caught my line of vision and I saw his shoulders tense once again. He looked into his lap and then at me.

“Roe, you can go back. You don’t have to come? This is not your-,”

His words trailed off as I was hit with the image of the man impaled on the branch. It had only been a couple of hours ago but things had happened so suddenly I had forgotten why I was there. I felt my face harden ever so slightly. I was here for a reason, I was here for a purpose, I was here to find a murder. I mentally slapped myself, I was stronger then this. I had been through worse then this. How had I let a little noise frighten me? It was pathetic.
I raised my eyes back up to Ray’s and his words caught in mid sentence. I was a little more cop then a moment ago. He didn’t need to ask me any more questions, I was seeing this through and he could do nothing to persuade me otherwise.

Ray nodded, a small shadow of his smile coming out. He reached down and started taking off his shoes, next was his watch, and then his shoulder holster, gun and all. I watched on confused.
“You should take off everything you want to keep. Anything of value you don’t want to loose because there is no grantee that they will let you keep it,” he explained.

I was growing frustrated, there was so much I didn’t know and I hated that feeling. But it was pointless to argue or ask why, so I simply took of my grandmother’s necklace and my jacket so I could remove my own shoulder holster. I hesitated with my gun, I could replace it, it was just a gun but Sam had given it to me when I had graduated the academy. Sighing I checked the safety was on and removed the mag and placed them separately in the glove compartment.
By the time all of this had happened, the group of figures were only a couple of meters away from the car. From this distance they appeared to be wavering shadows, like a mirage. The closer they got the more stable they became. It sounds weird but it was as though my eyes were trying to put their limbs together so that my mind could understand what they looked like. When you see things everyday your eyes just glaze over objects, people and you know what you’re seeing. But it was different, it was a sensation that hurt my head. I found myself using all of my concentration just to put their body into focus.

Ray’s voice broke through my concentration, “Don’t try to see them, it won’t work. Five minutes out of their presence and you will not remember anything. You’ll just give yourself a migraine.”

I was really sick and tired of getting all this information last minute. But after he had said it, I tried to picture what they had looked like and I drew up blank. There was nothing, I knew I had seen someone but for the life of my I could not description a single feature on any of them.

By now they had reached the car, I waited for them to do something supernatural, something weird. With the morning I had been having so far nothing would have surprised me I thought.

Looking back now, oh how could I have been so wrong?

A man, the one who seemed to be in charge walked straight up to the door and ripped it off the car. Right off, not a care in the world. Ray gave me a glance before climbing out of the car. Before I could question anything, I realised that my door had also been ripped off its hinges and there was another man standing by it waiting for me to exit the vehicle. An annoying voice in my head just said ‘What the heck?’ So I got out the car, only to be grabbed quite painfully by the arm and literally dragged over to where Ray stood. My toes just brushing the dirt.
The man in charge sized us up, looking at me, surprisingly, more then Ray. Without warning, he stepped up and sniffed me. As a cop a whole lot of creepy shit has happened to me but no one has ever sniffed me. It put me on edge more then anything else that had happened so far.
I was about to step back when the man yelled right in front of me, his deafing voice in my ear.
“You dare bring a human on to our lands!”

Ray stood still, staring out into the distance. His mouth opened very slowly and then his spoke, his voice calm and very precise, “I am allowed to be on this land, on my land. She is with me therefore she is allowed on this land also. So are our rulings.”

The man chuckled, even with the man this close to me my eyes still couldn’t put him together properly. But I had the distinct impression that he was tall. His voice seemed to travel from a distance above my head and I wasn’t tall, so he was either average or tall. It wasn’t much but it was something, it was all I had.

“Ah, well you know I had try,” the man then moved over to Ray and slapped him on the back his voice now friendly and less deafing which was good, “Always knew you’d come back some day, took you a bit longer than I expected. So I can only gather your here for a reason, it ain’t social ‘ey.”

Ray finally looked at the man and smiled, “As smart as ever Barkoo, I just need to ask Paleo and Nahsii a few questions, and then we’ll be gone.”

Barkoo frowned slightly, looking back to me and then Ray, “You know you’ll have to enter to see ‘em, they haven’t come out in years and there ain’t no way Shikoba will be lettin’ her enter, you know right.”

Ray shrugged, “Ah, well you know I have to try.”

Barkoo’s voice boomed out in laughter, “True, very true. Ah it’s nice to have you back however short it may be. Alrighty then, this ought to be interestin’.”

Barkoo motioned for the others to follow and lead of the way they’d come. Ray grabbed my wrist and pulled me forward, we were obviously following them as well.

I felt a tug on my arm, but it was only slightly so I ignored it but then it happen again more sharply. I looked at Ray who was staring ahead.

“What?” I whispered.

It would have appeared from an on locker that Ray had not heard me or was simply ignoring me. But as I turned away disgruntled I had him whisper back.

“Try not to draw to much attention to yourself when we reach camp, Barkoo is an old friend so his being nice but Shikoba won’t be so friendly. He’ll want to kill you on sight and principle. We want to enter so we have to smart about what we say.”

I only nodded. I was on a roller coaster, I friggin’ roaster coaster. Enough said.

After about forty minutes of walking I was about to collapse, I was surrounded by men with legs about twice the length of mine. It was hard to keep up and my feet were now covered in blisters and cuts from the rocks and dirt.

We had been silent the whole way there, the friendly exchange at the car was apparently over, Barkoo was the warrior again that could easily rip car doors off without breaking a sweat.
While I had been walking I watched as the strange cliff face grew closer with every step I took and the closer we got the more I couldn’t make out how the cliff face had been formed. It was as though someone had dropped this huge blood rock in the middle of a desert and then cut one side away in one shift go.

There was definitely something unusually about the rock. When we had been at the car the cliff face had looked like a good two days hike, but as we walked on the distance looked shorter and shorter. One moment it was a two day hike, you look away for a second and then it would only be a day hike, then a four hour walk. After forty minutes it was right in front of us. I couldn’t example it.

The rock face was about twenty stories high, sloping downward to connect evenly with the ground. So if you wanted you could walk straight to the top and look down. We were directly in front of the cliff face, it was the smoothest piece of rock I had ever seen. Taking a couple of steps forward, I reached out with my hand to touch it but was immediately stopped by Ray jerking me back. His face was gentle while he shook his head. I guess that was a no-no.
Barkoo seemed to ignore the whole exchange and reached out his own hand and placed it on the smooth surface. Closing his eyes, his hand began to shake against the rock, then a pulse burst out from his whole body disturbing the dirt under out feet. Coughing I tried to clear to the dust to see what was going on, by the time the dust had settled Barkoo had stood back. I was about to ask what all that was about when out of nowhere sticks began to push their way out of the earth, right below where Barkoo had placed his hand.

It started slowly with only a few branches breaking through, appearing as a shrub while the rest of it sprouted up. It only took five minutes for a huge oak to tree stand at around six metres high and the base of the tree hadn’t even breached through. I stood gob-smacked while the rest of our group looked slightly bored. Couldn’t they see the huge god-damn tree coming out of nowhere? Was I going insane?

Another five minutes passed and the tip of a tent could be seen through the dust floating in the air. After a whole twenty minutes, where before had only been a cliff face now stood an eight metre high oak tree smushed up against the rock. Two large tents were pitched underneath its branches, there was about fifteen men and women standing around watching us with beady eyes.

I felt Ray tighten his grip on my wrist, trying to reassure me that everything was alright but all I could focus on was the spears, bows, arrows, swords, axes, and some of the strange weapons I had seen in the restaurant all racked up on hocks along the cliff face. By the size of most of the men and even some of the women, they didn’t need weapons at all, sheer size was enough to stop anyone from entering the huge doorway they were apparently guarding.
With the shock of a tree rapidly sprouting out of nowhere I hadn’t initially noticed the rock start to etch out the door in the cliff face. But there it was, about a metre wide and three high carved straight out of the rock itself. It looked as though it would take everybody there to open the bloody thing. So I didn’t see why they needed so many guards to begin with. Whatever lay beyond the rock face, they didn’t want there to be any chance that someone might get through that door. This made me curious to take a sneak peak. But by the looks of the guards I would probably be dead before I even took a step.

I could see by the whole tree sprouting out of the earth thing, these people may be a tad over dramatic.