Acid Rain by R.D Rhodes (ebook reader txt) 📕

But that wasn’t why I was feeling so low. Or maybe it was, but it wasn’t just that. I just had to look outside and know what I was seeing. See what man had done and was doing to everything. I worried. I kept trying to block out the images of Dad and Nina and Sandy and Megan because there was nothing I could do. Was Dad okay? Was he in some other world and was he now suffering for what he had did? Was Nina alive? Had she broken her legs and got caught? Or had she died in the fall, or had she escaped? Would she be able to put those rapes behind her, and learn to trust people again, and to look at life with optimism? How would Sandy be, with all his hallucinations? And what if things had gotten worse at the hospital because Harry and I had ran away? What would happen to everyone else? To the little girl on the housing estate that got screamed at by her mum? To the little boy that copied his brother throwing a brick at the metal-barred windows? What would those kids grow up to become? What sort of world would they grow up into?

“I close my eyes and I wonder…. if everything is as hollow as it seems.”

He made sense. It was the truth, everything was hollow. It was no wonder people were scared to accept the way the world really was, diverting their attention in celebrity magazines, movies, sports and nothingness crap like that. The truth was scary.

I yawned and looked out at the lorries driving past- lorries full of logs from one of the many man-made, money-forests that were everywhere in that area. There was no nature anymore, nothing natural, nothing Godly. The landscape was dead. The people were dying inside it.

“Don’t even hear, the murmur of a prayer,

It’s not dark yet…..but it’s getting there.”

Old Bob was there with me. The music was with me. He knew what I knew.

The bus drove through Drumnadrochit, dropped off some passengers, and carried on down the A82. A signpost read-Fort Augustus, 30 miles ahead. I’d heard not along ago about what had happened at the abbey there- choirboys getting beasted by the priests.

But instead of going towards it, the bus turned right and took us away from the lochside. It drove along the winding roads through gloomy cluttered forests. Then out into the open and past the construction fields of yet another new wind-farm site, where the cement was being tipped out of a lorry into a massive hole in the earth. Then alongside the Beauly-Denny line with the new, giant, electric pylons rising up and away over the distant hills. Tractors and trucks were coming and going everywhere, up and down the mountains, tearing up the earth. The land was for sale. Man’s morals and soul was for sale. Everything was for sale for the right price.

The pale-grey silhouette of the sun behind the clouds kept sinking closer to the mountains. We went through more forest then a valley opened up beneath us, revealing a small remote settlement of houses dotted about between the trees, their chimneys blowing quiet smoke into the air to mingle with the darkening sky. The bus went round the bend into Cannich, past the old stone church and the less than fifty Victorian stone houses, past its empty caravan site, and onto its lonely main street. We pulled up outside the one village shop doubling as a post office. “Last stop!” the driver bawled.

Chapter 37

I woke Harry up as the last two pensioners navigated the few yards to the door and stopped to have a friendly word with the driver. We waited for the last old woman to decline the stairs.

“Thanks very much.” Harry said. “Have a good day.”

The driver glanced at his rucksack and his face screwed up beneath his orange cap. His big red cheeks puffed out,“Yous are nae goin camping in this, are ye?!” He nodded towards the snow-capped hills. “It’s fuckin freezin!”

Harry laughed. “Nah, we’re on our way back home. Been in the Pyrenees the last two weeks.”

“Oh, lucky yous. Ah’m away to Spain masel’ in two weeks. Cannae wait.”

Harry smiled. “Thanks again.”

“Ach aye!” The driver took of his cap and furled it in the air, “Take care then. Toodle- doo!” The automatic doors shut and the bus sped off.

“What a character,” Harry laughed as we laid our bags down on the pavement outside the shop. Harry adjusted the straps on his rucksack and put it back on.

“Which way?” I asked.

“Down this road straight. I think it’s about a four-hour walk.” He tilted his head up at the darkening sky, “Don’t think we will get in for sunset though.”

I guessed we had about an hour’s daylight left. “Just find a safe spot to camp along the way then?”

“Aye.”

We put on the hiking boots we had bought and threw our old peeling trainers into the bin. Harry bent down to re-tie his laces. I tightened the cords on my own rucksack. It was like a ghost town. The only signs of life came from the lit windows on the other side of the street, and the plumes of smoke blowing from their chimneys. The pavements were empty, and the road too, but for a few cars parked up and sleeping.

Harry tightened one boot and moved to the other one. Inside the shop, a bored sales assistant was sitting amongst the bright light, twiddling her thumbs on the counter and glancing at the clock. I could feel the air getting sharper, the cold curling around my neck and shoulders. I watched Harry double-knot his shoes. When I looked up again, the sky had turned much darker.

Harry stood up, looked at me, and smiled the