The Desert Road

Mick gets more than he bargained for in the desert.

Words 1980

He stood on the brow of the hill and tugged down the brim of his battered Akubra against the glare of the sinking sun. He leaned against the cooling metal of his cousin Frank’s beat-up Ute, and wondered what else fate had in store—breaking down in the middle of the bloody desert was just one more thing to add to the growing list of misfortunes.

He stared at the road which stretched into the distance before turning to look back along the narrow, dusty road which wound through the desert like a scar. Car trouble couldn’t have happened at a worse time or place, yet as nothing had gone right in Mick Duggan’s life for the last year he wasn’t surprised.

As always his thoughts turned to his kid brother’s death from suicide. Mick blamed himself for not being there for him. He’d seen the signs of depression but still he’d accepted the FIFO job in the mine, leaving Tom to fight it alone. He urged himself to stop thinking about it.

In frustration he kicked a tyre, and internally blamed his cousin Frank for not maintaining this piece of shit car. He shook a cigarette out of a pack, his hands trembled as he lit up. Taking a deep drag he took stock of his situation.

Retrieving his phone from his pocket he checked for a signal, not expecting there to be one here in The Great Victorian Desert. He began to walk away from the vehicle, waving his arms around in the vain hope he’d get even a single bar.

He’d heard of people who’d wandered off when their vehicle had broken down, never to be seen alive again and knew the wise thing was to stay put—someone was bound to come along eventually.

He sat on a rock overlooking the desert road which disappeared into the distance, reflecting again about the past year. At first, after Tom’s funeral, Mick thought he’d been coping. That was before the gradual slowing down of his life until he saw no reason to leave his house. Friends stopped asking him to join them for a barbecue or a pint at the pub, knowing the answer before the question was even asked.

His cousin, Frank, someone who’d known and loved Tom almost as much as he had, took Mick in to live with him and his family after he came out of the psychiatric hospital. He owed them a lot. Frank had even got him an interview for this job at a mine in Kalgoorlie and even lent him his Ute to get there.

Pulling himself back to his situation, he frowned when he noticed scrawled in white paint across the road a few hundred metres in front of him, the words— TURN BACK NOW— next to a pair of sun-bleached work boots. He stood and went to investigate.
Standing next to the boots, he glanced down at his own feet, clad in a pair of thongs which had seen better days. As it seemed likely he might still be faced with a long trek in the desert, he slipped the boots on. They felt familiar. His mind grappled with possible reasons as to why someone would have gone to the trouble of painting a warning way out there. Perhaps, he thought, it was someone’s idea of a joke or a way of keeping visitors or trespassers out.

A glint of light caught his eye. He saw a shattered phone lying in the dust at the edge of the road. He picked it up but almost dropped it with shock when the screen lit.
“What the hell…?”

A series of photos flashed, one after the other, on the cracked screen. The first was of himself walking down the road and another, tying on the boots. The final photograph was of him holding the phone. He let it drop, as if it had burned his fingers. The images had been taken from behind. He spun around— there was no one there. The phone went dead.

He stood rooted to the spot, attempting to make sense of what had just happened—he still didn’t trust his mind. Undecided as to what he should do next, he stared at the words on the road for a minute before returning to the vehicle.

**

Despite checking and rechecking everything he could think of, the motor still refused to turn over. Slamming the hood shut he looked into the far distance. Was it his imagination or could he see clouds of dust? The longer he stood there, the more he convinced himself the dust was caused by human activity. Perhaps a small town. Reasoning he had no other choice he grabbed his water bottle and began to walk.


As the sun sank further towards the horizon, the sweat on his face dried and walking became easier, his mood lifting when he saw a faint glow of lights in the distance.

As he walked, something snagged on one of the few straggly, barely surviving trees on the side of the desert road caught his eye. As he got closer he saw it was a faded denim jacket hanging limply by one sleeve. Puzzled he reached up to retrieve it, thinking it looked exactly like the one Tom was wearing when he last saw him..

‘Shit!’ he gasped, ‘How?’ His legs buckled under him, and he sank to the ground. He held his head and wondered, Am I going crazy again?
He’d pulled a note in his brother’s handwriting from the top pocket. It read: Turn back Bro. It’s not time.

He stared at the boots on his feet and swallowed deeply as saliva flooded his mouth. No wonder they’d felt familiar, they were his boots, and Tom’s jacket, but how…? What was happening? Mick’s mind swirled and tried to make sense of everything.

The silence pressed down on him like a vast, weighty presence. He shivered when a sudden breeze sprung up. Getting to his feet he slipped his arms into the jacket sleeves. Warmed by the sun, it felt comforting.

Mick stood frozen with indecision for a few minutes. Could he trust himself to make any kind of sense of what was happening? Should he return to the vehicle and wait for someone to come along or keep walking despite the warnings?
Come on! Make your mind up! Indecision froze his feet to the ground, until at last he headed towards the lights. He trudged along the deserted road, the darkness complete, walking made more difficult now by the arrival of a stiff breeze which scoured his skin and blasted sand into his eyes.

Exhausted, hungry, and thirsty, Mick Duggan at last arrived at what appeared to be an abandoned mining camp. To his shock, a rusty sign—DUGGANS PROSPECTING COMPANY— hung above an office building.

It didn’t take him long to realise there were no people here, no help to be had. The lights he’d been following for so many hours leaked from a row of worker’s dongas which gave the appearance of not having been occupied for quite some time. Unmade beds and remnants of half-finished meals, crusted-on to tin plates, told Mick the workers had left the tables and never returned.

The door to the site office swung wildly in the wind. Mick entered, closing it behind him, shutting out the noise and the biting sand. He breathed deeply, grateful for the relative peace. The slow drip of rusty-coloured water into the stained, stone sink made him realise how desperate he was for water. Barely able to even allow time for the water to run clear, he gulped the brown liquid until his thirst was quenched.

Before dropping gratefully into a sagging old armchair, he grabbed some of the paperwork which lay scattered across the desk. He wanted to make sense of what had happened, as it was obvious to Mick no one had been here for quite a long time. Paper cups, some half-filled with scummy coffee were beginning to disintegrate, the floor and the desk were scattered with the droppings of rats or other critters.

He skimmed through the ledgers, there seemed nothing of interest, nothing out of the ordinary which could explain the situation. The last one he looked at piqued his interest. Long lists of names, each with a date of birth next to their name in the first column followed by their date of death. His own surname, Duggan, appeared repeatedly, some names dating back over 100 years. The last on the list was his brother’s, Tom Duggan, dated a year before—1999-2024. It was then he saw something which made his blood turn to ice in his veins. Written in fresh ink, an unfinished line, his own name. Mick Duggan 1988-

Too exhausted to think of an explanation, he closed his eyes.

Mick, startled, sat up. Something had woken him. In an instant he was wide awake. He opened the door to the inky blackness outside and listened. At first, he thought it was the rumble of thunder before realising the sound was constant and getting louder, closer. He stepped back into the office as suddenly a convoy of mine trucks and Utes emerged from out of the darkness. They slowly passed on by, Mick noted the rusted metal and shattered glass and to his horror he saw the drivers were all skeletal, dressed in faded Hi-Vis gear.

The final truck slowed to a halt as it levelled with Mick, who stood paralysed with fear at the door of the office. In the driver’s seat sat his brother Tom, smiling with cracked lips, gesturing with a bony hand for Mick to get in.

Mick stood frozen with horror. Images of how Tom had once been, flooded his mind—his always ready smile and handsome face—and compared them to this rotting image before him. He closed his eyes—sure he was suffering a mental breakdown. He opened them again, convinced the convoy and his brother would have disappeared, but Tom’s dreadful smile had never shifted, his voice, sounding as if it came from out of the grave, whispered:

”You were always coming here Mick. The desert takes us all… but it does not have to take you today.”

The other drivers—generations of Duggan’s from way back—turned their hollow faces toward him, expectant, but Tom’s gaze never left Mick’s. He leaned closer. Mick saw no accusation in his brother’s dead eyes, only sorrow. “Don’t blame yourself, mate. I chose my road. Yours isn’t finished.”

Mick’s chest tightened. His instinct was to run, get away from this place, from what was surely a nightmare. He spun around to look towards the highway—his escape route—but it was gone, buried under the restless dunes. Ahead, the convoy began to move, engines growling.

Tom’s voice pressed gently into his mind once more: “Turn your back on the lights. Walk into the dark. The desert will let you go—this time.”

Then the ute door slammed, the convoy rolled on into the night and Mick was left standing alone, the silence of the desert heavy, but no longer felt hostile. He did as Tom had told him and turned his back on the lights of the camp and despite misgivings walked resolutely into the dunes.

The moon lit his way as he made his way across the endlessly shifting dunes, hoping the road would soon make its presence known. He imagined voices whispering, laughing, teasing, mocking him, telling him he was lost here forever, but Mick told himself it was just the wind moving the sand across the barren landscape.

At last he felt the road appear under his feet, hope stirred in his chest. Yet as he walked he saw boot tracks heading in the direction in which he’d just come. Tom’s voice whispered in his mind, gentle but persistent.

“Not tonight, brother, but the road always circles back.”

Prompt: Cover Image.
Written for Short Shots.