The Road That Fights Back

“Some roads don’t want to be driven—they just wait until you’re deep enough to start pulling pieces off you.”

The car started making a new sound around mid-morning.

Not loud. Just wrong. A dry, irregular rattle from underneath—like something had come loose and was now dancing angrily against metal with every bump in the road. It wasn’t constant, but it was insistent. A kind of percussion that didn’t belong to any part of the car we knew, tapping out a rhythm that seemed to match the beat of my pulse, fast and unsteady.

At first it was faint—so faint it almost blended into the usual chorus of vehicle and road. But it grew. I could tell Mum noticed it. She didn’t say anything, but I saw the way her shoulders shifted slightly. The way her mouth pressed tighter. Like she hoped if she didn’t name it, it might vanish. The same way you sometimes ignored a headache in the hope it would give up and leave on its own.

But the road didn’t help. It was a corrugated mess—a washboard of stones and hardened ruts that jolted the car every few seconds, like the ground was deliberately trying to shake something loose. With each bump, the rattle became sharper, more distinct. My teeth clicked together on the worst of them. Beside me, my tin of pencils bounced inside my bag, their metallic jangle adding to the chaotic soundtrack of a vehicle slowly protesting its treatment.

Mum’s jaw had locked into a shape that was beginning to look permanent. Her hands were tight on the wheel, knuckles standing out in stark relief, the veins along her forearms more visible than usual. She leaned forward slightly in her seat, as if that extra inch of focus might give her more control. One thumb tapped once—tap—against the rubber of the steering wheel. Then again. Not a beat, not music. Just nerves. Just something trying to escape through movement.

I looked down at the sketch I’d been working on, hoping to distract myself with something controlled, something mine. I’d tried to draw the landscape—again—but it had become a mess of spirals and smudges. Not trees, not earth. Just loops. Layers. Like a mind going in on itself. The lines looked like thoughts I couldn’t straighten out.

“Mum?” I said. My voice sounded small, unsure, barely enough to carry over the engine and the steadily intensifying rattle. I wasn’t even sure she’d heard me.

“What?” she snapped—not loudly, but too quickly.

“What’s that noise?”

“It’s nothing,” she said, the word tumbling out almost before I’d finished asking.

But even as she said it, the car gave another shudder. The rattle protested louder now, like it had taken offence at being dismissed. It clattered once, twice, then settled back into its angry rhythm.

We passed a gate then—standing absurdly alone, not attached to anything, just two leaning posts and a metal crossbar holding a rusted sign. NO ACCESS WITHOUT PERMISSION – FERAL DOG TRAPS ACTIVE. The red paint had faded into something almost brown, like dried blood smeared and left too long. There was no fence either side of it. Just the gate. A warning with no apparent borders.

I stared at it until it disappeared behind us, and still the words rang in my mind. Feral dogs.

I pulled Ribbons closer to my chest, pressing her soft form against the ache in my stomach. I imagined them—those wild dogs—lean and silent, prowling through this endless, empty scrubland. Survivors. Scavengers. Ghosts of the domestic. I wondered if they remembered what it meant to be pets. To be safe. To be known. Or if the wild had stripped all that from them, left them with only instinct and hunger.

I thought, not for the first time, about how easy it was to forget what you used to be when the world stopped letting you be it.

Mack leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees, watching the dashboard like it might offer answers. His gaze flicked between the dials, the lights, the creeping needles, searching for some mechanical truth buried in that glowing, dusty panel. The temperature gauge was rising—slow, but steady—climbing into the territory where things start to complain. Not quite red, but red-adjacent. Enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.

And then there was a light.

Amber. Small. Unfamiliar.

It glowed near the bottom of the dash—some symbol I didn’t recognise, a shape that could’ve been an engine or a toaster or the outline of a very unwell duck. It pulsed faintly, like a low-grade alarm trying not to be dramatic but still wanting to be taken seriously.

“Something’s dragging,” Mack said. His voice had that calm, grounded tone he used when he was talking about things with gears and levers—things with rules. “Maybe the exhaust, or something under the axle. Might’ve clipped a rock.”

Mum didn’t even glance at him. “It’s just the road,” she snapped, though her voice cracked slightly on the just, like she didn’t believe it either. “It’ll smooth out. These tracks are always rough.”

But it didn’t smooth out. Not even close.

The road got worse, like it was reacting to her denial. Each rise and dip more violent than the last, each pothole deeper, hungrier. The tyres thudded down with bone-jarring weight. My teeth vibrated. My ribs felt bruised from the seatbelt. My pencils danced again inside their tin, a brittle, chiming chorus.

And then the rattle changed.

It became something else entirely—less like something loose, more like something breaking. A grinding sound, high and ugly, like metal scraping against metal. It sliced through the car like a bad thought. My stomach clenched in response, a physical recoil, like my body was trying to reject the noise.

Click.

Louder, sharper this time.

Like coins thrown against concrete.

Then the lurch.

Not a full stop—more of a tug. The car jerked sideways slightly, an uneven pull that suggested something underneath had caught or jammed. I felt the shift deep in my spine, a wrongness that echoed inside the frame of the vehicle. Mum swore under her breath—short, sharp words she’d once told us never to use.

Her foot came off the accelerator. The engine stuttered—no longer a steady hum but a wheezing, uncertain grumble. An old man trying to clear his throat before the final words.

Then it happened.

The shudder.

The whole car trembled once, like it had been struck. The vibration ran through the chassis, up the seats, into our bones. Something internal had changed—something important. We all felt it. And then—

Nothing.

The engine gave one last, feeble cough and died.

Silence followed, but not the usual kind. Not the peace of a turned-off engine. This was different. It was emptier. A complete withdrawal of sound. No birds. No insects. Not even wind. Just the still, staring quiet of the outback—vast and eternal and completely indifferent to our presence.

The car coasted a few more metres and stopped in the middle of the red-dirt track, wheels resting in the shallow dip of a tyre rut. We didn’t even rock to a halt. We just... stopped. As though the land had decided to take us in and hold us there.

No one moved.

We sat inside the car like figures in a snow globe, frozen under invisible pressure. My breath sounded too loud in the quiet. I could hear the faint tick-tick-tick of cooling metal—the sound of effort unravelling.

Mum banged her fist against the steering wheel.

The sound cracked through the stillness like a gunshot, sharp and sudden, sending a jolt through the dashboard. The few loose items we’d accumulated—lolly wrappers, a bent map, a half-empty water bottle—shivered in response, rattling like they, too, had something to say about the situation. I flinched, not from fear exactly, but from the sheer violence of the movement against the hush that had settled like dust over everything.

“Oh, for—come on,” she muttered, voice fraying at the edges. The words came out warped, cracking mid-sentence, stretched too thin between frustration and something deeper. Something like fear, but older, more tired. The kind of fear that had been pretending to be control for far too long.

She turned the key again, too hard, as though force could change the outcome, as if sheer will might bully the car back to life. The engine responded with a pathetic cough, the mechanical equivalent of an elderly man being woken too suddenly. Then a click—a single, sharp note of refusal—and silence. The dashboard lights flickered once in half-hearted sympathy before surrendering, leaving behind the flat, unhelpful light of mid-morning filtering through dust-smeared windows.

One more attempt.

The key twisted. The ignition groaned, wheezed. Click. Rattle. Then nothing.

I watched her movements becoming sharper, faster, as if panic were trying to escape through her fingers.

Mack leaned back in his seat slowly, carefully, the way you’d move if you were trying not to provoke a wild animal. His face was a study in restraint—no smirk, no drama. Just that dry, deliberate flatness that somehow cut deeper than shouting ever could.

“Cool,” he said. The word dropped like a stone. “That’s great.”

Mum snapped her head around to glare at him. Her eyes were glassy now, red-rimmed, the white too bright. There was fury in them, yes, but also something vulnerable underneath.

“I said it’s fine.”

“You said that half an hour ago,” Mack replied, voice still maddeningly level. Not sarcastic. Not even accusing. Just… true. Which made it worse.

“I don’t need this from you right now, Mack,” she snapped.

He didn’t move. Just looked at her. And I could see it in him—the shift. The awareness. The letting go of something that had once looked like belief.

“You don’t need—?” He stopped himself. Breathed. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, Mum. Actually nowhere. Look around—there’s nothing. No help. No phone signal. No cars. Just us.”

His words didn’t come with heat. They came like weather—inevitable, slow, rolling in from a distance. Too big to argue with.

Mum opened her mouth, then closed it again. Her face kept moving—anger, then fear, then something quieter. Something like realisation, except realising something doesn’t mean you’re ready to admit it. Her gaze drifted back to the windscreen, and I saw it—the moment she saw. Really saw. The road. The scrub. The foreverness of it.

Then she wrenched open the door and climbed out, slamming it behind her. Too hard. The sound echoed against nothing, then disappeared into everything. The car rocked slightly on its frame, settling again like a startled animal curling back into itself.

She was gone from the space, but her absence made it feel larger. Empty in a new way. The driver’s seat still held the ghost of her shape, like she might return—but there was no sign she would. Through the windscreen, I saw her pacing, short, agitated circuits on the red dirt, kicking up dust that clung to her boots and turned her into part of the landscape.

The breeze stirred again—light, inconsistent. It picked up a small swirl of dust that spun near the tyres, danced for a moment like it was thinking of becoming a real wind, and vanished. A brief, half-hearted tornado. Gone before it meant anything.

The sun had climbed higher. Not warm. Just brighter. It didn’t heat the world; it exposed it. That harsh, colourless light that reveals every scratch, every crack. The kind of light that doesn’t forgive.

Mum kept pacing. Mack stared at the dashboard like it might apologise. I held Ribbons tighter, my thumb rubbing over the worn thread where her ear had been restitched, and tried not to feel the creeping sense that this wasn’t just a breakdown.

It was the world quietly letting us know it was done pretending to look the other way.

I hugged Ribbons tighter, pressing her stitched body against my chest like she could hold me in place, keep me from slipping into the strange stillness that had settled over everything. I rested my chin on her patched head and looked at Mack.

“Are we stuck?” I asked, even though I already knew. I could see it written across his face, in the set of his mouth, in the careful blankness behind his eyes. I could read it in the way Mum moved outside—pacing like a trapped animal, the air around her pulsing with tension. The landscape offered no arguments. It said yes in its own way—in its silence, in its stillness, in its total lack of help.

Mack didn’t reply straight away. He just opened his door with a clunk and stepped out, vanishing from my line of sight for a moment. I was left with the smell of hot metal and the faint, acrid trace of whatever had been burning, of something that had reached its limit and given up.

I didn’t move.

Through the dust-smudged glass, I watched Mum crouch near the front wheel, tugging at something beneath the car with jerky, uncertain hands. Her gestures weren’t confident. They were the movements of someone trying to appear capable, like when she used to read instructions for assembling flat-pack furniture and skip half the steps, convinced she could intuit the outcome through sheer force of personality.

Mack stood off to the side, not interfering. His hands were jammed deep into the kangaroo pouch of his hoodie, shoulders slightly hunched, head tilted as though taking mental photographs. I realised, suddenly and with strange clarity, that he wasn’t memorising the steps to help her. He wasn’t planning to fix anything. He was just… logging the moment. Marking the line where the journey changed shape—from hard to hopeless. From moving to stuck.

They didn’t speak for a long time. The silence between them was heavy, like something growing roots in the red dirt. Then Mum stood and wiped her palms on her jeans. Red smears bloomed across the denim—rust, probably. Or dust. But in this light, it could’ve been blood.

“Something’s loose under the guard,” she said eventually, her voice light in a way that felt artificial. “It’s not major. Just needs to be tightened.”

Mack didn’t nod. He didn’t fold his arms or roll his eyes. He just asked, calm and even: “Then why won’t it start?”

She turned to him fast, too fast, her body taut with defence. “It will. Sometimes engines just need a moment to… to settle.”

Even from inside the car, I heard the weakness in her answer—the way the words didn’t quite fit together properly. Like a jigsaw with forced pieces, the corners bent to make the picture complete.

She came back around and yanked open the door, sliding into the seat with renewed purpose. Her jaw was tight, eyes fixed straight ahead, the skin around them pale. She turned the key again, this time with a kind of defiant hope, as if belief alone could reanimate the dead.

The engine was silent for a heartbeat too long.

Then—chug. A cough. A noise like something clearing its throat after a long, bitter argument with itself. The engine caught, stuttered, ticked over into a kind of running that didn’t inspire confidence. It didn’t purr—it limped. The idle trembled like a leaf in wind, hiccupping and growling with irregular pulses, like it couldn’t quite decide whether to keep going or give up again.