Read The Hole for Free Online Page B

into the boy.
    They could both hear the impact, even over their own voices and the barking of the puppy, and the sound was terrible. There was a loud bang and a drawn out crunch, and then the truck was off the road and whipping around directly at the trees. This second collision, far from being merely audible, entirely drowned out everything else.

13
    Elliot pushed himself off the steering wheel, moaned, and ran his hand carefully across his forehead. Something didn’t feel right, something more than the warm tackiness his fingers skipped lightly across, something more than the pain even this tender contact radiated between his temples. No, this was an out of place difference, a nagging change in what he had expected after a lifetime of performing just such a gesture. He had encountered no hair. He thought about this a moment, then felt the heavy weight weight of the seat belt across his chest and the heat of blood in his cheeks.
    Je was upside down. Hanging, held fast in the the truck’s seat, he could now see loam crushed against the windshield and hear the sounds of the forest coming through the smashed driver’s side window. This was all distant, though, like he was watching it on a television across the room. If he just closed his eyes, maybe, and let a short nap incubate him against the sense of displacement, then he could approach the situation with the clear head necessary to figure out what to do next.
    No, Elliot. That’s not right. Going to sleep is, in fact, the worst thing you can do.
    He groaned and forced himself to look around. Only his window was broken and, out the back, he could see a line of scattered supplies spread across what looked like the slope of a hill. He swore, thinking of how much time it’d taken him and Evajean to collect all that stuff and get it stowed away in the truck.
    Evajean-
    She wasn’t there. He looked again at the passenger seat, panic making his face even hotter, but it was empty. Her seat belt was retracted and twisted around the headrest. He didn’t see any blood.
    “Evajean!” he tried to call out, but the pressure across his chest was too much and he only croaked an inarticulate vowel sound.
    She was gone. And so was the dog. This last hit him harder than Evajean’s absence, actually, and the feeling shamed him. It’s just that the dog was his. He’d found it and not matter how good her idea might be, he’d be the one to name it.
    His thoughts were fuzzy. He needed to focus. Where Evajean west was more important than a puppy, he knew that. There wasn’t any blood and no head shaped fracture in the windows, so she was probably uninjured. Maybe she’d gone for help.
    He laughed at this. Help had died with the rest of the world.
    Elliot reached around and undid the seat belt’s buckle, holding his other arm above his head to brace his fall. This small gesture barely helped-the pain in his skull bloomed again and he lay writhing on the roof of the truck for what seemed a very long time.
    When it abated, Elliot dragged himself through the broken window, careful of glass, and stood up. The trees had killed most of the remaining sunlight, which filtered weakly through the canopy. The ground was wet and dark, overgrown with moss and ivy, much of this blanketing decaying logs. He couldn’t see any sign of foot traffic, no discarded clothes or supplies that might give him some idea of where Evajean had gone. He shouted her name again, getting the full volume this time, but received no response. She must be far away, then, and he didn’t know which direction that might be.
    Elliot turned around to see about the truck. They certainly wouldn’t be driving it back up the hill. The grill was smashed up against a huge tree stump and the left front tire was bent at a bad angle. Everything they’d carefully backed into the back, the entire haul, had been scattered by the fall in a neat path back up the slope, with a large dump of it where the truck and probably first rolled