Terminal

It ran through the park, trailing off through the estate. It's width had increased in size since yesterday, Jacky thought staring at bulging astroturf under the swings it had now warped the slide into a kind of aborted helter-skelter. The swelling ground had crippled the round-a-bout to, the trees seemly in the grip of a sclerosis where stripped bare. A foul smell that neighborhood seemed to repress as it quickly regressed into disrepair was to clearly coming from underground, the steaming crack had confirmed this.

His head ached, the day was rotting away in the late afternoon humid heat, an investigation was in order, he thought enthusiastically, rolling a lollipop around his mouth, Jackie a street-smart boy at eleven a loner, delinquent some may say. He surveyed his terrain. The bushes growing throwing shadows across the park the sodium lights spilling pale yellow across the run-down neighborhood. He scanned his phone it was 7pm, the day was closing in darkly.

Spitting out the pop-stick into nearby pothole he made his move and followed the split tarmac across the park, concentrating to avoid the dog shit as he past the pub, bookies and chippie where it had knocked a postbox off center, opening up wide into an alley in an area out of sight, other places just a hair line hard to see, but always seeping a sticky substance with musty pang, worse than shit.

Moon pigs and car insurance jingles streamed through his mind obnoxiously as he followed the crack as it branched out through a derelict street, where it lead to a large building site on the outskirts of the estate. Jacky ran a stick across the ruptured concrete and across some passing steel-rails shattering the silence of the streets, the crack now disappearing under highrise plywood fencing that surrounded the construction site.

The peeling pink advert covered fencing concealed something rank, he knew this. He pulled away at a loose aluminum patch covering a crumbling board, pushing his hand through the pulpy mass of decayed wood chip - soggy weetabixs came to mind. He ducked and crawled through the opening he had made, the streets now silent dark, he looked back on the nothing new. Home was distant..nothing new.

The street lights lit the place eerily picking out machinery and scaffold poles, the crack expanding out into the shadow and out of view into a tangle of black mass in the distance.

His skull ached - agony like something trying to force its way into his eyes, ears and nose. Nuts tightening stomach crawling as he followed crack trance-like into the shadow for a full five minutes, it seemed like forever the site was huge, the smell noxious.
He stood before it, a stupefied expression on his face - eyes wide fixed on the nightmarish growth of pulsing gristle - vein covered tumour bulging from a now yawning chasm cut into the center of the abandoned site, yellow growth dark – greenish an about twelve meters in length - ten wide, just the tip as the rest was submerged under the bulging tarmac, it made a sucking sound as it rippled squirmed - scaffold poles where protruding from it, perhaps a failed attempt to submerge it. The things odour overwhelmed Jacky, he vomited bile down the front of his shirt..his eyes streaming with tears. Jackie knew what it was his, his daddy had died from it.

Only an hour before he was full of a curious enthusiasm, the feeling had now decayed within him. In its wake only helplessness. Jacky left the way he came, not scared any more.