Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [88]
Ryan stopped talking as they went around a curve that had a drop-off on the left. He could feel a knot growing on his forehead like a unicorn horn. All he could see was air, haze, and blue sky. Scooter turned the wheel too hard, and they went back across the road to the right, where the Land Rover nudged a barrier of rocks, bounced, hit it again, and then without Ryan knowing how, spun around 180 degrees. They were suddenly sailing down the hill backward, the cliff on their right.
Scooter was screaming a torrent of curse words, and then Perry was yelling, too. He heard metal on metal. Metal on rock. Metal on dirt. Metal on trees and brush. Bushes rushing past the sheet metal and windows. He was tumbling inside the car. They seemed to tumble forever. When they finally stopped, all he could hear was steam hissing out a broken engine hose and the stereo, which was still blaring. Scooter was moaning. At first Perry figured Scooter was surely dead, or about to be, while he himself was going to be okay.
Considering what he’d just gone through, Perry felt surprisingly sound. It seemed as if they’d been sliding and rolling and careening forever. It was only when he tried to get out that he realized he couldn’t move. Not an inch. Not his arms or legs or head. Not even his pinkie. In fact, now that they’d stopped tumbling and he’d stopped holding his breath, he came to the sudden realization that he couldn’t breathe, either. He was in a vise of crushed metal, and the vise was so tight he couldn’t expand his lungs or close them. He was so constricted, he could barely squeeze thoughts through his cranium. One thing was certain. If he didn’t get out of this in just a few seconds, he was going to suffocate.
“Somebody help me,” he wanted to say, yet, when he tried to speak, the only thing that happened was a little bit of warm blood trickled down his chin.
39
Muldaur heard the crash behind him and began to decelerate. It had sounded like a house rolling down the road, metal grinding, trees snapping, glass breaking, and, buried in the middle of the insanity, one man screaming.
He coasted another 150 yards before he found a widening of the road where it was flat enough to turn around, then began riding back up toward the accident site.
The grade was like a wall in spots, and he marveled at how recklessly he’d been descending. He used his lowest gear and slid forward on the saddle so he wouldn’t tip over backward. The slopes on the left side of the road were peppered with Douglas fir, and there were trees off to his right amid the gullies. Farther up there’d been bluffs and death-defying drop-offs, but they’d crashed at a spot where a screen of trees caught them.
He and Zak had separated earlier at a place where the road dropped like the dip in a roller coaster, and at the bottom of that dip was a hairpin curve to the left, a turn Muldaur had barely negotiated. There’d been a bailout road mostly overgrown with grass and saplings, which Zak had taken partway back up the hill while Muldaur continued left. Neither said a word. It was simply understood that Zak couldn’t make the corner.
Now Muldaur saw a long strip of chrome on the edge of the road and found scuff marks in the dirt where the Land Rover had gone into a stand of immature trees. The trees had netted the SUV, bringing it to a halt before it could tumble farther down the mountain. It was on its roof, nose pointing toward the road, small trees crumpled under it.
Muldaur laid his bicycle on its side, then carefully picked his way down the rock scree toward the crash site.
They’d all been flirting with disaster, but for some reason the reality of the accident hit him now like cold water. His heart was in his mouth, sweat dripping off his nose and out of his helmet. It was a weird feeling, walking down to this wreck he’d precipitated, almost as weird as seeing Chuck Finnigan step off the bluff this morning and not