Two and a half hours later, Cal had made some good steady progress down the highway and through several suburbs. He was finally starting to leave behind the stink of the sewerage treatment plant and could now smell the briny rotten egg smell of the coastal mangroves that separated the city from “the northern suburbs”. He despite the feeling of weariness from the long distance walking that he totally wasn’t used to, was still pretty upbeat and had enjoyed the scenery alongside the walk.

Cal mused about how the race course and the turf club was interesting in that it didn’t look like he had expected it to. He didn’t come this way very often, maybe once or twice when his dad had driven down to the city and dropped him off on his way to work for the government. He usually took the bus that went down the more central road that didn’t have to wind it’s way around most of the mangroves but cut a straight line right through them. The Nation had one of their communities that fronted along that way and it had always intrigued him what life was like in those communities.

Where he had grown up in the outback full blooded tribesmen were pretty rare and while his mate Samuel who was what some of the townies called a half-caste, for having been adopted by white parents. The term had always made him cringe inside every time he heard it, yet alone the fact that it was dumb, just because he had been adopted by white parents. There wasn’t much he could do about what other people thought, so he had tried to be as good of a friend as he could and hung out with him as much as possible. But as they got older and went to different high schools they’d drifted apart. So he was a bit excited about the possibility of an entirely new people and culture to explore right in his back yard.

One of the many places that his dad had taken him when he first moved up here had been this beautiful wetland reserve that belonged to and was solely run by the local tribes. It was a pristine paradise of nature and man living in harmony together with nature. The research and observatory stations were seamless in how they were incorporated into a very fragile ecosystem. That and the time they had spent out at the hunting reserve had been worth all the heat and living with the sweat.

During the time that he had been walking, a fog had slowly moved in off the bay and settled in up and down the entire peninsula. Over the next two hours the fog grew in thickness till Cal could barely see twenty meters in front of him. Cal grew more miserable, as his thighs had begun to chafe, his clothes getting progressively more damp from the fog. The footpath ran out and he had to walk up near the road itself. The only marker of his progress was the street lights that appeared out of the fog every so often. The dead silence hung on Cal as he tried to waddle a bit to relieve his chafing thighs.

“Jeez, a car could come out of nowhere and you’d never see it till it was too late. I should probably move off the edge a little bit to be safe.” Cal had a bad habit of talking to himself when he was nervous and the oppressive atmosphere coupled with the increasing amount of pain he was in was ramping up his anxiety.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Moving from the side of the road, he walked in the depression next to the road, trying to keep as close to it, without being on it as possible. But what Cal didn’t know was that as the road bent around one of the few corners, that the fog was thick enough that without the road as a guide there was the possibility that he could loose sight of the road and it didn’t take too long before what he thought was the side of the road was actually a dirt track that was taking him farther and farther away from the beaten path and off into the swamp. When he finally realized that the track wasn’t conforming to the bends in the road that he thought he should have hit by now he stopped for a moment to consider his options.

“Ok, obviously I’ve wandered a bit too far from the road. I'll just go this way and cut through until I’m back in touch with the bitumen again….nothing to worry about.”

Stomping around in the dark obviously wasn’t a brilliant idea and when he ran into another line of scrub trees where his sense of direction told him the road should be he started to get the beginnings of a proper panic.

“Ok, I’ll just walk back the way I came, whatever fucked up turn I took, I’ll just keep following the clearing until I find the road again, cause I don’t want to go trekking through the mangroves.”

With that thought firmly in his head he turned around and headed back, the chafing in between his thighs had gone from an itch to a low burning sensation. He attempted to backtrack but because it was night as well as the heavy fog that was obscuring everything, he of course over-corrected and missed where he had gotten onto the track ending up in-front of another line of mangrove trees that his now thoroughly confused sense of direction told him just shouldn’t be there.

Nope….nope nope nope nope nope NOPE NOPE….

Kept running through his mind as he started to panic. In probably the stupidest move yet, he crossed the tree line and entered the mangroves, thoroughly convinced that he could just bull his way through back to the road and then everything would be fine again. Within five minutes he was thoroughly and irretrievably lost but he compounded bad judgment with reckless stupidity and continued walking for how long he didn’t know. It was only when the intensity of the chafing in his thighs reached a point where he could barely move that he finally acknowledged what his situation was.

That the only way he could be more fucked was if he’d won the lottery while in a Vietnamese whore house.

A multitude of shitty choices, almost like a butcher’s bill had come due all at once and Cal, his clothes damp and his shoes sodden folded to the ground like the sack of shit he was. His fear manifested itself as he blubbered and cried, his eyes wide as he well and truly lost his shit. Some time later having exhausted his tears, he wiped the blubber and the snot from his face with the back of his sleeve and managed to stand back up. The outpouring of fear and weakness had done him some good by managing to restore some of his calm, so he looked around and found a somewhat dry place to sit and think about how he was going to pull himself out of the right cluster fuck he’d made of walking home.

As he looked around, he thought abo…..hang on….was that a light. “FUCK…..” he tripped over himself as he struggled to get up in his excitement, falling into a puddle of swamp water drenching himself up to his elbows.

“Ahh fucking great.” He groused for a moment but Cal didn’t continue to whinge as he gleefully stood back up, for the light represented hope, as well as salvation from the current mess he was in.