crawling along at ten miles an hour. At this speed, they wouldn’t get home for an hour. Caroline pressed her foot down on the accelerator.
It happened all at once.
Too late, Caroline felt the deadly absence of grip in the road. An instant later, a sharp sound shot above the noise of the howling wind. Instantly the car careened wildly as Caroline lost control, spinning dangerously to the left. Panicked, she braked hard, and the car spun horribly, completely out of control.
A dark shape suddenly loomed, two glowing lights visible high up off the ground like the eyes of a giant predator. A desperate squeal of brakes and a blast of horn as deep and as loud as a foghorn…
It took Caroline a full second to realize that she was about to ram head-on into a massive truck. “Oh my God!” she screamed, as they slid on the black ice, right into the path of the dark, massive oncoming shape.
“Let go of the wheel and brace yourself,” a deep, calm voicesaid. Two strong brown hands gripped the wheel, turning the car into the slide, and Jack’s left leg reached over hers as he gently tapped the brakes in a slow, regular cadence, shifting down the gears.
The slide slowed, became controlled, not that awful, sickening spinning horror. The car made a complete 360-degree turn. Jack kept it moving left until they came to a stop an inch from a lamppost on the left shoulder of the road. A second later, the massive truck barreled by, horn blaring angrily. The small car rocked with the wind displacement.
It happened so quickly. One second she was battling the wind and snow and the next they were in free fall. The adrenaline shock of a near accident raced burning through her system. If Jack hadn’t taken the wheel, they’d have died in a crush of steel, in a mangle of broken bones and blood.
They’d been a second from dying.
She had her hands to her mouth, covering a scream that wanted to break out. The tickle of bitter bile trickled up her throat, and she swallowed, hoping she wouldn’t vomit.
Caroline was shaking so hard she felt she would fall apart, the vision of the front of the truck bearing down on them still fresh in her eyes. She was gulping in air frantically, throat tight with panic.
Her seat belt was unlatched, massive arms pulled her to a broad chest.
Oh God, strength and safety.
She dived into him, huddling, trembling, arms tightly wound around his neck, breathing in panicked spurts, until the worst of the shaking died down.
A big hand held the back of her head, almost covering it. Caroline’s face was buried in his neck, the stubble along his jawbone scratching her forehead. Her nose was right against the pulse in his neck, beating steadily and slowly, like a metronome, in contrast to her own trip-hammering one.
There was the minty scent of snow, a pleasant musky odor that must have been him and, oddly, the smell of leather. His long black hair had come loose in the wind and flowed around her face, surprisingly soft.
There was nothing soft about the body she was held against, though. It was like embracing steel. He’d pulled her tightly against himself as if he could absorb her wild trembling.
“It’s okay,” he murmured. She could feel the vibrations of his deep voice. “Nothing happened, it’s okay.”
It wasn’t okay, not by a long shot.
This was exactly how her parents had died—a bad snowstorm, black ice, a truck plowing into their car. A mangle of flesh and steel so horrendous it had taken the highway patrol six hours with the Jaws of Life to get their bodies out. There had barely been enough of her father to bury.
Caroline had woken up more nights than she could count in a sweat, imagining her parents’ last seconds of life. The terror as they saw the truck looming suddenly out of the snow, the heart-sickening realization that it was too late. Her father had been impaled on the steering wheel, his legs sheared off at the thighs. Her mother had lived for two weeks, in a coma.
And Toby, poor
Lex Williford, Michael Martone