Blood in the Truck

“I thought the worst thing I’d find in the back of that truck was chaos—but nothing prepares you for silence laced with blood.”

As I emerged from the Portal's embrace and staggered into my study, the sudden shift from Clivilius's harsh desert glare to the softer Tasmanian morning light streaming through the windows left me blinking, disoriented. The colours of the crossing still danced at the edges of my vision, fading like the afterimage of a camera flash. I steadied myself against the desk, one palm flat on the wood, waiting for the vertigo to pass.

The house was wrong. Too quiet, too still.

No barking. No scrabble of claws on floorboards. No warm bodies hurling themselves at my legs in welcome. Without Duke and Henri, the silence pressed in with an almost physical weight, accusatory in its emptiness. The space where their presence should have been felt like a missing limb, a phantom ache reminding me of everything I'd disrupted by my carelessness.

My heart rattled in my chest, a cacophony of conflicting emotions jostling for dominance. Behind me, the Portal still shimmered where I'd opened it in my desperate haste, its impossible colours rippling against the mundane backdrop of bookshelves and the computer where I'd been tracking inventory what felt like a lifetime ago. The juxtaposition felt obscene—that doorway to another world hanging open in my study like something that belonged there, like it had always been part of the furniture.

Bringing my mind into focus, I closed the gateway. The shimmer folded in on itself and vanished, leaving nothing but ordinary wall, ordinary morning, ordinary lies I would have to construct to paper over what he had seen.

Joel. The delivery driver was still here somewhere. He had to be.

The thought of facing him, of explaining what couldn't be explained, sent a fresh wave of dread through me. How does one clarify a desert, a nightmare, and a shimmering gateway between worlds without sounding like a lunatic? How do you make someone unhear what they've heard, unsee what they've witnessed?

The answer was simple: you don't. You disguise. You omit. You redirect. You make them doubt their own perception, question their own memory, wonder if perhaps they'd imagined it all. That was the only way forward.

I pressed my fingertips to my temple, mind churning through excuses, weaving fragments of plausibility into something that might hold under scrutiny. A light installation, perhaps—some art project a friend had left with me. An elaborate prank. A trick of the light and his own exhaustion. The lies felt flimsy even in conception, but they were all I had.

First, though, I needed to find him.

"Hello?" The word leapt out too quickly as I stepped into the hallway, sharper and louder than I'd intended, startling even me. It bounced off the walls and came back to me, hollow and unanswered.

I moved through the hallway towards the front door, each footfall deliberate yet hesitant. Through the widening gap, the driveway revealed itself in stages—concrete, shadows, and there: the truck. Still stationary. Still intact. The white bulk of it sat exactly where Joel had parked it this morning, as if nothing had happened, as if the world hadn't tilted on its axis in the hour since.

The sight was both a balm and a barb. Relief washed through me in a fleeting wave—at least he hadn't driven off to report strange occurrences to his supervisor, or worse, to the police—only to be undercut by the creeping dread that hadn't left my stomach since I'd returned. The vehicle stood as if untouched, yet its very stillness felt wrong, accusatory, as though it bore silent witness to my growing web of half-truths and omissions.

With a sense of urgency snapping at my heels, I pulled my phone from my pocket, its smooth screen glowing like a cold reminder of the other crises vying for my attention. There was no time to linger on Joel, or on the potential implications of his wandering curiosity. That reckoning would come soon enough. For now, a more immediate priority demanded my focus: Jamie's wound, festering like a hidden landmine, threatening to detonate at any moment.

The image of that infected gash surfaced unbidden—the angry red flesh, the pus seeping from the rupture, the smell that had made my stomach turn. If I didn't get him proper medical attention, and soon, the consequences would be catastrophic. And not just for Jamie.

The phone felt heavy in my hand as I navigated to the number I already knew by heart. As the call connected, I forced my breathing steady, donning the mask of calm persuasion that had served me well in moments when desperation needed to be cloaked in control.

"Hello, this is the Hobart Family Doctor's Practice. You're speaking with Michelle. How may I help you today?" Her tone was warm, professionally rehearsed, the kind of steady cheer designed to smooth over the frayed nerves of the sick and panicked.

"Hi, Michelle, it's Luke Smith calling. I need to see Dr De Bruyn urgently, please." My voice betrayed me, taut and brittle, the urgency threading through every syllable despite my best efforts to sound normal.

Dr De Bruyn wasn't just a doctor to me. She was the fulcrum upon which this delicate plan balanced. A stranger, an unfamiliar GP, might ask too many questions—draw the wrong conclusions about how Jamie had acquired such a wound, about why we'd waited so long to seek treatment, about the strange circumstances surrounding our lives. De Bruyn, though, was pragmatic, discreet. She had the clinical mind I trusted to handle Jamie's injury without prying too deeply into matters that couldn't bear scrutiny.

"I'm sorry, Mr Smith. Dr De Bruyn is fully booked today. If it's urgent, it may be best if you visit the emergency department," Michelle replied, her tone slipping into that infuriatingly neutral cadence of someone trained to shut down panic with policy.

Emergency. The word sent ice through my veins. A hospital would mean questions. Records. Mandatory reporting if they suspected anything untoward.

"No," I said quickly, my voice pressing forward with desperation. "It must be Dr De Bruyn." The words hung heavy, carrying more weight than mere preference. It wasn't just about medical expertise—it was about trust, about control, about ensuring our secret didn't spiral beyond containment.

"One moment please."

The line fell silent, and I was left with nothing but the faint hum of static and the indistinct murmur of distant voices. My mind filled the void, each second stretching into an eternity, my chest tight as the possibilities sharpened. What if she couldn't fit us in? What if I had to take someone from emergency after all? What if—

Then Michelle's voice returned, cutting clean through the fog. "Are you still there, Mr Smith?"

"Yes, I am."

"You're in luck. We've just had a late cancellation. I'll book you in for late this afternoon."

The words hit like oxygen after drowning. Relief, sharp and momentary, coursed through me, though it carried a bitter aftertaste: late this afternoon. A gulf of dangerous hours lay between now and then, each one an opportunity for Jamie's condition to fester into something worse, for the infection to spread, for the situation to deteriorate beyond what even De Bruyn could salvage.

"What time?" My tone was clipped, almost biting.

"Four-fifteen."

I cringed inwardly, my jaw tightening. It wasn't soon enough. It would never feel soon enough. The wound wasn't simply a burn—it was a countdown, and the longer it ticked unchecked, the greater the risk.

"Thank you," I forced out, the words rasping through the tightness in my throat. My thumb hit the red button, severing the connection before the brittle mask of composure could slip.

Relief and dread collided within me, a duality I had come to know too well in recent days. Help would soon be on its way, but not nearly soon enough. The appointment was a lifeline, yes—but one dangling over a chasm that deepened with every passing hour.

The open front door loomed before me, an ominous threshold rather than a welcome, its yawning silence a mockery of the life it was supposed to contain. Without the dogs charging forward to greet me, without the hum and clutter of ordinary domestic noise, the house felt hollow—like a theatre after the audience has left, chairs empty, stage dark, waiting for a performance that might never come.

"Hello?" My voice cut into the emptiness, echoing back at me in tones that seemed unfamiliar, thin, almost vulnerable.

A stray breeze crept in through the doorway, tugging at my shirt. Goosebumps flared across my arms, a bodily admission of the anxiety tightening its grip inside me. My steps towards the door were measured, hesitant, each one amplifying the silence rather than breaking it.

"Hello?" I tried again, my voice firmer this time, as though conviction alone might summon Joel back into being.

Where had he gone? Why hadn't he waited? The questions multiplied with each unanswered call. He'd seen something impossible—surely that would make a person wait for explanation, for reassurance, for some acknowledgment that they hadn't lost their mind?

I retraced my steps through the hallway, the house mocking me with its stillness, every echo of my footfall a reminder of what wasn't there. The possibilities dwindled fast, my thoughts inevitably circling the most chilling conclusion: Joel had seen too much. Perhaps curiosity had tugged him past the shimmer before I'd closed it. Perhaps he had stepped where he shouldn't.

If Joel had entered Clivilius—if an outsider had breached the sanctity of that world without guidance, without understanding—the consequences were staggering. He could be lost in the desert right now, wandering without water or direction, while Paul and Jamie had no idea he existed.

The sudden, jarring clang of the truck's back door slamming against its side sent a bolt of adrenaline racing through my veins. My breath caught, and for a fleeting second my heart leapt with hope.

"Oh, thank fuck," I exhaled, the words spilling out in a ragged rush, relief and irritation coiling together.

The fleeting calm was ruined almost instantly by my own body betraying me. A deep, guttural gurgle twisted from my stomach, loud in the silence, grotesque in its timing. I pressed a clammy palm against my abdomen before wiping it quickly against my jeans, ashamed of the weakness. When had I last eaten? I couldn't remember. The morning had been consumed by crises, each one bleeding into the next without pause for anything so mundane as food.

"This is ridiculous," I muttered under my breath, scolding myself as though sheer words could reassert control.

But even as I tried to will rationality back into the moment, caution gnawed at the edges of my relief. Something was wrong. It hung there, unspoken but undeniable, a prickling at the base of my skull. My instincts—those sharpened, prophetic whispers I had long since learned to trust, the ones that had guided me through childhood nightmares and adult impossibilities alike—told me not to walk blindly into the open.

As I approached the truck, something prickled at the edges of my perception. Compelled by equal parts dread and a hunger for certainty, I approached closer, my breath shallow, eyes narrowing as I peered into the gloom of the truck's interior.

"Holy shit!" The words escaped in a strangled whisper, the syllables caught somewhere between my lungs and throat. My body locked in place, adrenaline flooding every nerve, for there—jutting out from the shadows, pale and motionless—was a foot.

Distinctly human. Unmistakably still.

But it was the shoe that destroyed any hope of denial. Joel's. The same trainers I'd watched him step out of the cab in this morning, the same soles that had crunched on my driveway as he'd carried Duke back to me with that sheepish, apologetic smile.

A surge of panic twisted into my gut, sharp as broken glass. Concern ran alongside it, but so did something darker—an instinctive calculation, a catalogue of consequences unfurling with vicious speed. If Joel is hurt—

"Are you alright?" My voice cracked into the silence before I could stop it, pitched half in desperation, half in command. The absurdity struck me even as the words fell—of course he wasn't alright. Feet didn't protrude from shadows like that unless something was very, very wrong.

Driven by an urgency I couldn't contain, I seized the edge of the door and hoisted myself up into the truck's bed. My hands gripped the cold metal as my legs scrambled for purchase, my pulse battering against my ribs.

The smell hit me first—not death, not yet, but something faintly sour, sweat and fear lingering in the stale air. My chest tightened as I drew myself over the threshold, bracing for what lay beyond. Joel's unexpected presence here, his limpness, the vulnerability of his body stretched before me—it tore open a hundred fears at once.

In the dim, confined space of the truck's interior, I fumbled to find Joel's pulse, my fingers clumsy, driven more by desperation than skill. The air was thick, stifling, pressing in on me as though the shadows themselves wanted to choke the life from my lungs. My fingertips brushed against the clammy skin of his neck, but there was no reassurance there, no steady rhythm to meet my searching touch.

Time distorted, stretching grotesquely, every second lengthened into an eternity as the dread inside me multiplied. I pressed harder, then shifted, trying again on the other side, clinging to the flicker of hope that maybe it was my incompetence, not his silence, that was to blame. Each failed attempt only magnified the terror gnawing at me, the hollow dread that I wasn't enough—that I had never been enough—to stave off the tide of disaster.

Nothing.

The word echoed mercilessly in my head. A void, a silence louder than any scream. My breath hitched, chest constricting as if the absence itself was strangling me.

Driven by sheer panic, I pressed more firmly, as though the force of my will could conjure life from the void. My fingers slid against his skin, and then—something else. Wet. Not the faint sheen of sweat, but a slick warmth that clung to my touch, that made my hand recoil before my mind even registered the truth.

A cold horror coiled around my spine, rooting me in place. Trembling, I brought my hand closer to what little light filtered into the truck's interior. The dim glow revealed the stain, dark and glistening, smeared across my fingers.

Blood.

The implication slammed into me, merciless and unrelenting, unravelling the last fragile threads of my composure. This wasn't exhaustion. This wasn't faintness. Joel's condition was so much worse than I had allowed myself to fear.

My stomach revolted, heaving against me in primal betrayal. The bitter scorch of acid tore up my throat as I lurched away, barely managing to turn before the violent spasms overtook me. The retching was raw, a physical purge of shock and terror, splattering against the truck bed, each convulsion wringing me out, leaving me shaking and hollow.

I wiped at my mouth with the back of my hand, trembling, my mind caught in the clash between denial and the grotesque truth. The copper tang still clung to my skin. Joel's blood. Joel's silence. Joel's absence of life.

My throat burned raw, each breath scraping like sandpaper, but worse than the physical discomfort was the knowledge that I couldn't look away. The scene before me was no fleeting nightmare, no grotesque trick of the imagination. It was irrevocable, seared into my mind with a clarity that would never fade.

Joel—the young man who had minutes ago been flesh, breath, and clumsy smiles, who carried Jamie's features in a way I still couldn't explain—was now nothing but stillness. His body lay slack beside me, his blood spreading inexorably outward, a dark tide consuming the floor of the truck. It seeped into the fabric of my jeans, warm and wet, a grotesque intimacy that tethered me unwillingly to his death. The mingling of blood with the sour stench of my vomit created a tableau so foul, so degrading, that I could scarcely reconcile it with the vibrancy he had carried only hours earlier.

For a heartbeat, my mind clutched at the fragile notion of an accident. Perhaps Joel had stumbled, cut himself in some unthinkable misfortune, a tragic but innocent mishap that fate had cruelly chosen. Perhaps he'd found something sharp in the truck bed and fallen badly, bled out while I was gone—

Yet the thought evaporated almost as soon as it formed, devoured by the undeniable evidence before me. This was no accident.

The gash was obscene in its clarity, a single, definitive statement carved across his throat. The cut was wide, deliberate, and devastatingly effective. Its edges gaped, ragged yet purposeful, speaking of intent rather than error. This wasn't a fall. This wasn't bad luck. Someone had done this to him. Someone had held a blade to his throat and drawn it across with enough force to sever everything beneath.

The arterial spray marked the truck's interior in a gruesome constellation, each crimson droplet a syllable in a story of violence. The patterns spoke of struggle, of a body that had tried to resist before the blood loss made resistance impossible. Joel had fought. However briefly, however futilely, he had tried to live.

And he had failed.

The air itself felt altered—thick, oppressive, saturated with the metallic tang of blood. It pressed against my skin, invaded my lungs, made me feel complicit simply by breathing it in. The silence inside the truck was unbearable, a silence that screamed louder than any sound. It carried the echo of Joel's final moments, an absence filled with imagined gasps, the wet rattle of a life being stolen.

My thoughts fragmented, rushing, colliding, unravelling as I tried to piece together a logic where there was none. Who had done this? How had it happened so quickly? I had been gone—what, fifteen minutes? Twenty? Long enough to cross to Clivilius, to sit with Paul, to discuss concrete slabs and dog-sitting. Long enough for someone to find Joel in my driveway, to murder him in cold blood, to disappear without trace.

The more my mind reached for answers, the further it recoiled, as though the truths themselves were too monstrous to face.

But the truth was unavoidable. The evidence around me was not ambiguous. This was no random cruelty of nature, no terrible accident, no coincidence. It was deliberate, intimate, targeted. Someone had chosen Joel's death, had executed it with the kind of calm violence that suggested experience, and in that revelation came a new terror—sharp, suffocating, invasive.

The implications spiralled outward like cracks spreading through ice, threatening to shatter everything. If someone had done this, then they were close—close enough to find Joel, close enough to act in the brief window of my absence, close enough to vanish before I returned. This wasn't just Joel's death. It was a message. A warning. A declaration that someone knew about the Portal, about Clivilius, about me.

And they were willing to kill to prove it.

In the shadows of my mind, another thought whispered with the persistence of poison: perhaps the danger wasn't confined to Joel at all. Perhaps it extended to everyone tethered to me, to Clivilius, to this impossible secret I was clutching too tightly. Jamie, already wounded and vulnerable. Paul, trusting me despite everything. The dogs, stranded in an alien world because of my carelessness.

Perhaps, in the end, this danger would consume us all.

I sat there in the blood-soaked darkness of that truck, Joel's body cooling beside me, and felt the weight of every choice I had made pressing down on my shoulders. The Portal. The deception. The desperate gamble that I could build something in Clivilius without consequences bleeding back into the world I'd left behind.

I had been wrong. The consequences were here, painted in red across the walls of a delivery truck, carved into the throat of a young man who had done nothing worse than bring me tents and ask to use my bathroom.

And now I had to figure out what to do next.