Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [1]
No good. People were beginning to wake at the back, falling from their bunks, crying out. The bus continued its lurching, backwards skid. Within seconds it had turned itself fully around, facing back the way it had come, its wheels finally stopping as they thumped sickeningly into the kerb on the opposite side of the road. There was the sound of breaking glass, more shouts and cries and then the most terrifying moment as it keeled over onto its side and hit the ground with a thunderous crash.
Of the nine people onboard, two lay trapped beneath the bunks, which had collapsed on top of each other, left to right, as the bus turned over. Five sustained minor injuries – a broken toe, something else – and one lay dead beneath the stricken bus, his legs poking out from under its side. The driver was lucky. He would jump free with only minor cuts and bruises.
Dawn lay just across the horizon but the hour was still dark, still freezing cold. One of the first to leap from the wreckage had been the drummer, a short skinny kid with long tea-coloured hair who now took off, sprinting down the road, not knowing where he was going, just that he was fucking gone, so freaked out he couldn’t even feel the pain of his broken toe, the smart young schemer so used to seeing round corners yet never seeing this. No way.
Behind him came the guitar tech, a six-foot seven-inch giant of a man who had crawled from where he’d been thrown out of his collapsing bunk towards the front left exit, now a hatch in the ceiling through which he climbed, clothed only in his underwear, his giant’s back in agony where he had thumped it against the lip of his bunk as the crash of the bus had thrown him sideways and down.
From the rear emergency exit came the singer, tall, deranged, also just in his underpants and socks, yelling and screaming, bloody of mind, followed by the guitarist, another short skinny-arsed figure, coughing and crying, his large dark eyes brimful of night sky and ashes. Everyone was shouting and screaming, no one knew what was going on, what to do, what was happening. It was still dark, freezing cold, and no one was prepared for it, for this, whatever this was. All they knew was that it was bad, fucked-up bad. Big time fucked-up bad…
By the time the second tour bus carrying the rest of the crew turned up over an hour later, the first of seven ambulances had also arrived but only the tour manager seemed to know what had actually gone down, and he was in such shock he had no idea how to convey it to the rest of them. That, as they climbed aboard the ambulances and headed for the hospital, they would be leaving behind one of their own. Not just anyone, either, but the one they all felt carried with him most of the luck. The one they all cherished above the rest, above each other, that they always looked up to, even as they made fun of him, or chose to disregard his advice, his sense of integrity and of right and wrong, always that little bit too much for the rest, just young fucks not always into what was right but what was fun right now.
The darkness lifting, grey dawn sky blurring over their heads, they climbed into the ambulances and drove off, not knowing yet that they were leaving behind not just their past but their future. The one they had all dreamed of and shared with each other, spoken and unspoken, right up to the moment the bus hit that invisible patch of ice, the fucking driver if not asleep then not awake enough to follow the bending road; the map to the treasure they all knew was theirs to share right up till the moment the devil took a hand in things and changed their lives for ever.
Right up to the moment Cliff Burton, bass player, left before them, taking with him the soul of the band with the dumbest