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walk on all fours,
to avoid falling backwards.
    Once there, she was breathless. She sat on the
tarmac. It didn’t feel too hot through her skirt. There was no one in sight.
Turning her back to the carriageway, she leant her shoulders against the
guardrail, and only then it occurred to her that she was dripping with sweat.
Why hadn’t she taken off her jacket? Feeling stiff, she slipped out of it
slowly, also because it now felt glued to the blouse she was wearing under it.
The latter was white, but being wet, had become transparent, revealing a
matching white bra. Well, it would turn out useful to snag a lift.
    With her luck, she would get into the car of a
maniac, who would rape, kill, and throw her in a ditch. She laughed.
    A distant noise pulled her out of her black
humour and made her turn to the left. A car was coming.
    With an agility she didn’t remember she owned,
she snapped up on her feet, climbed over the guardrail, and leapt to the middle
of the carriageway, waving her arms. The tarmac was burning, if possible, even
more than before, but she had learnt how to ignore the pain at her feet. She
had a future as a guru walking on red-hot coals.
    “This way!” Her shouts were broken by the
returning of her laughter.
    The car kept moving. She could’ve sworn it
wasn’t slowing down at all. However, she kept waving her arms. It would surely
stop.
    After a few seconds her certainty turned into
doubt, then certainty again, this time that it would run over her.
    The deafening sound of a horn split the air
and Amelia threw herself against the guardrail, while the car proceeded
undisturbed.
    “Fucking bastard! This is failure in duty of
care!” she shouted to it. Her trained eyes deciphered the number plate and memorised
it. Oh, yes, they would pay for this.
    Then she was caught by a flash of inspiration.
Her badge. She returned to her jacket, abandoned on the roadside, and searched
through her pockets. But they were empty, save for a small packet with
sugar-free sweets, the sight of which only caused another grumble from her
stomach. “For fuck’s sake…” She tossed them away. No trace of her badge. She
had a fleeting memory of the last time she’d seen it. When she’d climbed on the
van, she had put it somewhere. It was still there.
    “My usual good luck.” She was already talking
to herself like a lunatic.
    She’d been so engrossed in her thoughts that
only now she realised that a car was arriving from the other direction. She
rose at the same moment as it passed in front of her, and went on. She didn’t
even have the strength to try to draw the driver’s attention. They wouldn’t
hear her.
    The car screeched to a halt. It remained
still.
    Amelia didn’t know whether to hope it would
reverse. Okay, she probably looked like someone needing help, but she hadn’t
gestured to it, and a car stopping without a reason before a woman along a road
recalled insistently to her mind the hypothesis of the maniacal rapist.
    The car made a U-turn and resumed moving
towards her. It was a high-performance saloon, with a shiny new bodywork. At
least it wasn’t a poor devil, but it could be a rich maniac. As the vehicle
came closer, she made out the outline of the driver’s face, despite the glare
on the windshield. He was wearing a pair of sunglasses, but his look was
vaguely familiar to her.
    The saloon stopped beside her; she was looking
at it as if she was hypnotised.
    It couldn’t be true.
    The window lowered. The driver had a perplexed
air. He took off his glasses, revealing a pair of ocean-blue eyes that she had
already seen more closely.
    “Amelia?”
    “Mike?”

 
    3
     
    “It’s a crazy story!” Mike exclaimed, after
listening to the account of what had happened to her. “I grasped something had
happened, because all at once they lost any interest in me, and there was a lot
of movement.” He tapped the steering wheel in an amused manner. “As soon as
they told me they didn’t need me anymore, I