STOP!

This is a stop sign. 

John looked around, just to reassess the situation once again. He was still in the desert, not the fancy ones like in Africa, with majestic sand dunes, and scorching heat, but the one where the landscape is flat and lifeless. Rocky soil that even weeds won’t grow on. Lifeless land that even cockroaches avoided. The cold, almost freezing wind that was torturing him for days now. 

And yet, here it was—a stop sign in the middle of nowhere. 

-I must be going completely insane, - John mused, circling around the thing completely alien to this landscape. 

-Either that or this is an elaborate prank. 

He looked around once more. The benefit of being on a flat, desert surface, is that you can see very far before the earth begins to curve, and the horizon hides things from view. John could vaguely remember that his physics teacher had told him a number, something like 5 kilometres? John couldn’t recall, but that was hardly surprising. If he bothered to remember these things, he might not have ended up in the middle of the desert in the first place.

John stared at the sign once more. It didn’t mind the attention.

No matter how hard he looked, it looked the same as any other stop sign would: a metal pole, ending with a hexagonal sheet of, presumably, also metal, with the word “STOP” written in white on the red background. It looked brand new too, which only added to John’s confusion.

He checked his backpack. There was enough food and water to last him a couple of days, more than enough to cover the remaining distance. So this shouldn’t be a hunger-caused hallucination. He didn’t eat any of the already rare grass sprouts or drink any water from the cracks in the ground that got filled in the last rain either. Even his clothes were specifically chosen to resist direct sunlight and freezing blasts of wind. 

So the surroundings had nothing to do with this. The sign had to be real. It even felt real. 

John touched the pole. It stung him with cold, and the feeling of the freezing metal surface was sobering. He just had to accept the fact that the sign was real.

-Oh well.

John shrugged and kept going. What else could he have done? But he only managed to take a few steps beyond the sign, as a sound stopped him. 

-Ahem. 

A dry cough, aimed at attracting attention could as well have been a cannon volley, so out of place it felt here. 

John turned around to find a short, thin, pale man standing next to the sign he just passed. The man wore a policeman uniform and had an old clipboard in his hands, his fingers covered by a pair of white gloves. The height difference and the long visor on his hat didn’t let John see his face well enough, but the man soon fixed that himself, raising his eyes to meet John’s. 

-How very rude of you, sir. 

His long, sharp ears twitched with every word, and John could swear he saw sharp fangs behind the man’s thin lips. 

-Excuse me?

With nothing but confusion in his mind, John could only apologise. Yet it seemed that this was exactly what the man was counting on.

-Apologies won’t do you good, sir. You violated the common law, page 64, rule 17B, article 8. 

-I’m not sure I’m familiar. 

This sounded nothing like the laws John knew. Unfortunately, the man’s reaction made John realise that he wasn’t amused by this ignorance.

-The violation of the procedure for crossing a limited territory, a criminal offence, punishable by…

He flipped through the pages of his clipboard.

-A single instance of the state-decided fine, or a 30-month prison sentence, with a possibility of parole. 

The man smiled, and John took a shaky step backwards. He didn’t imagine that the man’s mouth was filled with tiny, razor-sharp teeth, saliva dripping from them right on the deep blue fabric of the uniform. 

-Which will it be? 

John turned around and broke into a sprint. This thing wasn’t human, and the last thing he needed was to deal with it, not when he was so close to goal! 

-Resisting arrest is a violation of law 4D, article 13! 

The deep voice turned high-pitched, screeching right behind him, and John turned his head around. Wrong choice.

The human-like monster was chasing him, completely abandoning that little that made it seem human. It dropped on all fours, limbs bending in all the wrong directions and ripping through the fabric of the police uniform. A long, barbed tongue emerged from inside the creature's gaping maw, flailing wildly. 

A backpack flew from John’s shoulders, smashing the thing right between the eyes. No longer encumbered, John sped up. Not looking behind, not slowing down, not stopping, not…

The sound of sharp limbs scraping against the ground behind his back drove John to the brink. His lungs screamed for oxygen, but he had no time to take a breath, not even enough time to exhale. Legs on the verge of collapse, they kept taking him forward, further and further. 

-You have to pay the fine! 

The guttural roar grew distant, and only after the sound of claws ripping through the earth went completely quiet, John allowed himself to collapse. Oxygen deprivation finally took a toll, and John’s mind went completely dark.

-Sir, sir! 

John awoke abruptly, screaming for his life. 

-Oh my! 

A young woman dressed in a white nurse attire, and with a medical mask on her face, leaned over John, her eyes wide open with surprise. 

-Don’t worry sir, you are safe now. You were found outside of the city and brought here. We took care of you, sir. 

John breathed haphazardly, his gaze running all over the hospital ward. He made it, he reached the other side of the desert! He was finally gone from that god-forsaken country, finally in the free lands! 

But he couldn’t triumph, not yet. The terror he had just experienced didn’t let go. The nurse had already moved towards the door when she suddenly stopped and checked an eerily familiar clipboard.

-Oh, by the way, regarding your hospital fee, don’t worry, it was fully paid for…

John tried to lift himself up in response, but his body simply twitched a little. Waking up from his nightmare little by little, it only now occurred to him there was no feeling in his arms or legs. Confused, he raised his eyes, meeting the gaze of the nurse, who had taken off her mask. Her barbed tongue slid along the rows of sharp, bloodstained teeth.

-Together with your fine.