One wrong turn, p.19
One Wrong Turn, page 19
Paul turned the wheel hand over hand, grit crunching under their slowing wheels as he guided them to a halt.
For a disbelieving second, there was silence.
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I lowered my left hand to my thigh, arching my fingers. My hand felt curiously inert. My palm was drenched in sweat.
I coughed.
My heart was pounding so fiercely I was scared Collette would notice my pulse jumping in my throat.
73 miles per hour . . .
I surreptitiously wiped my palm against my leggings.
Then I moved.
Before I was ready or committed.
Before I could change my mind.
My hand sprang sideways, spider-like. My fingers spread outwards. I clamped down hard.
On metal.
And skin.
The gun barrel and part of Paul’s hand.
My heart leapt.
I squeezed as tightly as I could and wrenched my hand forward and the gun came free, surprisingly easily.
Until it didn’t.
Until – an infinitesimal fraction of a second later – Paul seemed to catch up to what I was doing and tightened his grip on the gun, jerking back against me with a stunned and aggrieved look on his face.
My fingers slipped. The gun barrel was oiled, my skin was greasy, and I almost let go altogether.
‘Hey!’ he yelled.
‘Give it to me!’ I shrieked.
‘Don’t let her get the gun!’ Collette shouted.
I felt my skin tear. There was something sticking up on the gun barrel. A metal protrusion that was digging into me.
But I didn’t let go.
Blood oozed over my fingers, coating my skin, loosening my grip even further. The world outside my windscreen became a blur.
Paul pumped his arm backwards again.
The steering wobbled. The car shimmied.
Still, I held on.
Paul stared at me as if I was deranged.
I didn’t know how fast we were going now. Not exactly. My speed had dipped a little bit.
But we were still going fast enough for a nasty accident.
I think Paul sensed that. I think he got that he needed me to let go of the gun as soon as possible.
Which is when he whipped his other hand forward, clenched my wrist and began trying to prise my hand off the gun.
No.
It was working.
He was squeezing my wrist so tightly it felt like my bones might fracture. My grip was failing. If the sight hadn’t ripped into my flesh and snagged on my skin, I might have let go already.
So I did let go.
Of the steering wheel.
With my right hand.
I grabbed his wrist, pulling at his arm, driving my thumbnail into his skin as deep as it would go.
Paul gasped.
‘Are you crazy?’ Collette screamed.
The car had started to drift. It arced out of the slow lane towards the fast lane, the steering wheel turning of its own accord.
But I wasn’t going to let go.
I wouldn’t brake.
‘We’ll crash!’ Collette shouted.
Paul tugged on the gun even harder. I yowled as my ripped skin began to give way. But I redoubled my grip on the barrel, digging my thumbnail deeper into his flesh, and when he wrenched free the hand he’d been using to try to prise my first hand away, I immediately transferred my free hand to his gun hand, pinching and twisting his skin.
‘No!’ Collette stretched forwards between our seats, grabbing for my upper arms.
I should have let go, then.
I knew that.
My odds of getting the gun were now vanishingly small.
‘Look out!’ Collette barked.
For a fraction of a second, we all turned towards the windscreen.
The steering wheel had drifted further to the right and the car was spearing towards the central reservation. The metal barrier loomed.
And still I didn’t let go.
Maybe I was crazy. Maybe all the panic and horror had shorted my mental fuse board. But I still believed that Paul would relent and let me have the gun.
Then he moaned very loudly, as if he regretted what he was about to do, and I felt a squirming under my palms as he clenched his knuckles and grimaced, sliding his index finger backwards, slipping it in through the trigger guard next to the trigger.
Saturday Night
10.58 p.m.
‘Can you fix it?’ the woman asked.
‘No, I can’t fix it,’ Paul told her. ‘I’m hardly a mechanic.’
He was huddled forward over the ignition, turning the key fruitlessly again and again. But nothing happened. There was no spark.
The hazard lights clicked dimly. Paul had already put the bonnet up and rushed out to shine torchlight over the engine bay for several hopeless seconds before dropping back into the driver’s seat.
‘Shit!’ he roared, banging his palm off the steering wheel. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’
Samantha’s shakes were getting worse. She was breathing so fast she was almost hyperventilating.
Then she went cold all over as the woman reached forward and placed a hand on Paul’s arm in an oddly familiar gesture.
‘It’s OK,’ the woman told him. ‘Everything is going to be OK.’
But the harrowing look Paul gave Samantha told her he didn’t believe that was the case.
Slowly, he turned in his seat and looked at the woman behind them.
‘What now?’ he asked.
55
BANG!
The gun went off like a grenade had exploded in our hands.
There was an enormous kick, a burst of heat, a shattering of glass.
My hearing was gone. It just stopped instantly as if someone had hit mute on the world.
Cold air blasted through my side window, raging against my clothes, hair and face.
I instinctively clasped my arm to my belly, shielding my baby, terrified I’d been hit.
It seemed to take an age for me to understand that the glass next to me had been blown away.
Then I became aware of the scorching heat on my hands. The intense, bee-sting pain in the arm I was holding myself with.
And the central barrier racing impossibly closer.
Saturday Night
10.59 p.m.
‘Now?’ the woman mused.
There was a moment of stasis. Of quiet.
They seemed quite alone in the fog, as though they were lost in the first hushed seconds following the detonation of a bomb. Outside, mist descended on the car like falling ash.
Samantha turned her head in slow and fearful increments, looking back at Lila’s car seat, wishing with all her being that she could hold her daughter right now.
‘Oh, Paul,’ the woman said. ‘You of all people should know how quickly plans can change.’
And she prodded her gun into the back of Samantha’s seat and pulled the trigger, twice.
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I tore my good hand away from the gun and seized the steering wheel.
I didn’t brake. My instincts told me not to. We were much too close to the barrier, going much too fast. I sensed the tyres would lock, like they had earlier when I’d almost hit Paul, and we would skate into a devastating impact.
Paul had shot me.
He’d shot me.
The same way he’d shot Ben.
I spun the wheel to my left, crying out from panic and the searing pain in my lower arm.
I felt as if I was steering a boat.
The car didn’t respond. We plummeted onwards. Then we did start to turn, but everything about the turn felt wrong.
The left side of the car was rising up. Paul and Collette were floating above me, their bodies flailing against their seat belts, their arms rag-dolling up towards the ceiling of the car.
Meanwhile, the suspension on the right side of the car was compressing beneath me as if I’d driven into a hidden trench. The baby changing bag came loose from where Paul had wedged it and thumped into the door behind me.
We’re going to flip.
I was sure of it. Could visualize it happening. The car tumbling and spinning and somersaulting into the oncoming carriageway in a mess of compressed metal and shattered glass.
My foot fluttered on the brake, but I resisted the temptation to press harder.
The barrier raced towards us.
I saw headlights from the opposite carriageway, blindingly bright.
At the last second, I turned the wheel even harder, risking catastrophe, but somehow the car responded, swerving to the left impossibly fast, tyres scrabbling to keep to the road.
A hail of stones and loose debris peppered the underside of the chassis. We thumped and ploughed through weeds and undergrowth, the steering wheel leaping in my hands. The headlamps of the passing car whipped by, accompanied by the bleat of a horn.
We swiped the barrier side-on.
The impact reverberated through my door.
My wing mirror was ripped off, disappearing into the night, and a shower of hot sparks blitzed by my open window.
I screamed into the void, nearly incapable of hearing my own voice.
We seemed to scrape the barrier for a long time, though it could only have been a second or even less before the side of my car peeled away from the barrier, darting back towards the road.
I heard a final faint note from the horn of the car that was disappearing past us on the opposite carriageway as I stared ahead, stunned and breathless.
My left arm stung with a searing intensity, as if I’d been branded with a hot poker just below my elbow. Girding myself, I glanced down in horror towards my stomach and saw that the sleeve of my sweater was soaked with blood.
No.
I snatched my arm away and patted my stomach, melting with relief once I was sure that I hadn’t been hit there.
Then the pain in my arm flared again.
I stared at my arm, still grappling with the bewildering reality of being shot by Paul, when I heard a sucking, gurgling noise, like water swirling down a drain. My ears crackled and my hearing returned with a whoosh.
Paul and Collette were yelling loudly.
It took me another second to realize that I was, too.
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‘Pull over!’ Collette shouted.
‘Shit!’ Paul yelled.
‘PULL OVER!’
I closed my mouth and tried to do the simple things.
Like breathing.
And not passing out.
All my strength evaporated in an instant. My core temperature dropped to a deep and enervating chill.
The shock of the gunshot – the reality of it – had brought with it a horrible clarity.
I’d started to believe that Paul and I were ensnared in this situation together, but I’d been kidding myself. Something else was going on.
My shakes got worse. My insides shrivelled. I looked ahead blindly, tears welling in my eyes.
I suddenly couldn’t feel my left arm at all.
‘Try that again and you’re dead,’ Collette screamed loudly.
I didn’t reply. It felt as if my lungs were encased in ice.
‘You shot me,’ I mumbled, tripping over my words, my lips fat and waxy.
‘I had to,’ Paul said in a hurry. ‘You shouldn’t have gone for the gun.’
I looked down at my belly, horrified by the blood loss from my arm, terrified by what it might mean for my baby. I couldn’t lose this child. I just couldn’t.
‘What are you doing?’ Collette demanded. ‘Watch the road.’
But the road was irrelevant now. Everything was.
I’d loved Ben, and he’d loved me, and why had we let anything else get in the way of that?
‘Abi!’ Paul shouted.
I began to see black dots. There was a whooshing in my ears. My head slumped.
‘Abi, what are you doing?’
‘Take the wheel, Paul!’ Collette shrieked. ‘Grab it. Quick.’
Saturday Night
11.02 p.m.
Yelling.
Screaming.
Samantha could hear Paul and the woman arguing and shouting at each other. Sometimes dimly. Sometimes much too loudly. Paul sounded terribly distressed and upset. But obscuring everything else was the pain.
Her pain.
It was burning through her insides, blaring in her mind.
She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
I’m dying.
But not quite yet.
Not for a few seconds more.
In her desperate state, Samantha listened, sometimes clearly, sometimes not, as Paul and the woman raged at one another, Paul telling her she was out of her mind, the woman shouting at him to get out and flag someone down or—
Samantha must have blanked out, her consciousness stuttering vaguely back as the woman reached in past her feet for her handbag, upending it in the footwell, sorting through it, taking something, a few things. It was so quiet now. She couldn’t hear Paul anywhere. And Samantha felt so sickly and broken and . . .
Lila.
Her heart fluttered.
Was her daughter in the car seat behind her, or was she imagining it? She could no longer tell what was real and what was not.
Please don’t hurt my baby. Please don’t take her from me.
Samantha couldn’t form the words, any words; all she could do was will them out into the ether.
And then the woman was standing, looking down at her.
The door closed.
The car rocked.
Footsteps outside.
On the gravel.
Samantha’s vision was fading, darkness sweeping in. Her hearing was muffled and warped. She could feel her heartbeat slowing, slowing, sputtering . . .
. . . A bright light . . .
. . . A warm glow . . .
So this really was it. She just had to let go now and—
The light swept past her.
Darkness returned.
In her last fragmented moments, a barely formed thought passed through Samantha’s mind.
Was she hearing engine noise? The scrub of slowing tyres, the clunk of a door opening, footsteps?
Had somebody stopped?
Was somebody here?
Please protect Lila.
Please keep her safe.
And then, finally, nothing more.
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Silence. Stillness. A vague swaying sensation, like being jostled in a dinghy out at sea.
What brought me back was the stinging in my forearm. It was a violent, pulsing thing. My flesh writhed and burned.
I cried out and clamped my hand to my arm, wincing in pain.
Then, slowly, I became aware that Paul was withdrawing his right leg from in front of me. It took me another second to realize that he’d been pressing down on the brake pedal. His legs were straddling the central console.
‘What happened?’
I looked at him groggily, then at the world outside. We were stationary by the side of the road, hugging the white line that separated the slow lane from the grubby strip of tarmac where we’d come to a stop.
‘It’s OK,’ he told me, returning his leg to his side of the car. ‘We’re all OK.’
I watched without speaking as he separated his hands from the steering wheel. His face was bloodless, his mouth aghast. He dropped back into his seat and picked up the gun, then he stared at me as if he was equal parts stunned by what I’d done and astonished that we hadn’t crashed.
I felt the same way.
The engine had stopped and it took me a moment to understand that the swaying sensation had been from my car stalling. My hazards were flashing and clicking. All around us was darkness and silence.
To the left were open fields. To our right was the empty dual carriageway. Cold air gusted in through my shattered window, freezing the sweat on my skin.
My mouth was tacky. I felt weak and shivery. I bent my left arm at the elbow and carefully peeled my sleeve back from my arm.
OhMyGod.
Blood. Torn flesh.
But . . . no bullet hole?
I grappled with that for a sluggish moment until another gust of air swept in through my obliterated window. Turning my head, I stared at the jagged fragments of glass that remained, realization coming slowly. The bullet must have clipped me on its way out.
Had Paul tried to miss me? Had the shot been a warning?
Very gently, I extended my arm, flexing my fingers with great care. I still had some movement, but not much. My wound was oozing, but it wasn’t bleeding as badly as I’d feared. It looked more like a deep gash.
‘Hurts, doesn’t it?’ I turned with my heart in my mouth to see that Collette had raised her bandaged hand into the air. ‘Ricochet. Turns out there’s a lot more plastic and bits of metal in one of these seats than you might think.’
‘Seriously?’ Paul seethed.
I nearly gagged as a sickly awareness settled in my stomach. Collette was telling me that she was the one who’d pulled the trigger and killed Paul’s wife.
‘I think I’ll have the gun now, Paul,’ she said. ‘Pass it to me.’
Shit.
Was she about to kill me, too?
My breath stopped. Coldness sluiced through me. I was clammy and trembling all over my body.
Paul delayed for several long seconds, looking at me. I stared back at him, shaking my head imploringly, mouthing the word ‘no’.
But it didn’t change anything because, after a second more, he swore and hurriedly handed the gun to Collette, then turned from me to grapple with his door release.
A car roared by.
I hadn’t seen it approach.
I was only dimly aware of it blitzing by.
‘Relax,’ Collette told me. ‘Witnesses, remember? This road is a little too public for what you’re worrying about. And right now, you’re more useful to me alive.’
I didn’t think I could trust her.
I knew I couldn’t trust her.
My heart felt enormously heavy as Paul spilled outside, taking two or three unsteady steps before stopping and standing with his back to us, clasping his hands to his head, the tails of his mackintosh flaring at his sides. He remained motionless for a few seconds, looking after the tail lights of the car that was speeding away into the distance, and then he doubled over and yelled very loudly. It was a primal howl of grief and pain and regret. His upper body was shaking. His fingers were digging into his scalp. When he eventually turned back to us, his face was grossly contorted, with tears streaking down his flaming cheeks.
