by Amira Rain
However, not knowing what else to do, I still wasn’t ready to give up on honking as a way to try to get help. Two cars passed me on the opposite side of the road, and I honked at them both, then had the idea to turn my emergency flashers on, which I immediately did.
Now I just needed someone to see them on and call the police to report a sighting of a speeding car with emergency flashers on. The only problem, though, was that I was well out of the city by this time and pretty deep into the sparsely-populated part of Moxon.
“You’ll still see another car soon, though. Don’t worry.”
My comforting self-talk had come out in a shaky near-whisper nearly drowned out by the warm air rushing in through the windows.
Had I stayed on the road I was on, I most likely would have seen another car before too long. Not only would they see my emergency flashers on, but I’d flash my brights at them, too. Also, I knew that the Moxon Country Club was just a little way up ahead, and I decided I’d try to hang a left into the parking lot, honking wildly to try to get the attention of the many golfers that I knew would be out on the golf course on a sunny spring afternoon. Then, the sedan would surely take off, I thought. Although hopefully not before I or someone else could catch their license plate number.
However, at least a half-mile before the country club, the sedan suddenly pulled into the left lane, rocketed forward, and passed me before slamming on their brakes. With a silent scream, I jerked the steering wheel to the right, reflexively making the only move I could in order to avoid hitting either trees on the other side of the road, or slamming into the sedan in front of me.
The sedan had forced me onto Sears Road, a paved back-country road which essentially led to nowhere. Nowhere except rolling forestland for about ten miles before bisecting a one-stoplight village called Welch.
I was in serious trouble now, not like I hadn’t been before. But now I had a feeling deep in the pit of my stomach that I might actually die. I knew there was only one reason for a car to run another car out of the city and isolate them in the middle of nowhere, and that was to hurt a person. Maybe even kill them.
“But not if I can still lose you.”
Although I felt sick, dizzy, and terrified, I was determined to fight for my life. I really didn’t have any other choice. It wasn’t like the chances of a police car driving up Sears Road in the middle of nowhere were extremely high. I was going to have to save myself if I was going to be saved at all. Fortunately, I was kind of used to this feeling of having to depend on myself. I’d felt this feeling for just over a year, ever since my mom had died.
Gripping the steering wheel tightly even though my hands were trembling nearly out of control, I floored the gas pedal, knowing that I had mere seconds to get a head start before the sedan did a U-turn or reversed and started down the road after me.
I’d only been down Sears Road a couple of times when visiting one of Kayley’s friends in Welch, but I knew that there were a couple of crossroads I might be able to veer down, and that was my plan. It didn’t even matter that these crossroads were back-country roads similar to Sears. I just needed to speed down one fast enough to lose the sedan. Then, maybe I could pull over somewhere and call 911.
I only had about ten seconds to revel in the hope of my plan before seeing the sedan in my rearview mirror.
“No. No, no, no.”
I continued flooring it, miraculously getting my ten-year-old car up to seventy-five. The sedan began accelerating toward me, rapidly getting larger in the mirror.
“Oh, no. No.”
I was beginning to feel as if I couldn’t get enough air, despite the rapid breaths I was taking. I was beginning to feel like I might pass out.
Flying up the road, I drove maybe a mile or two before the sedan caught up with me, giving my rear bumper a good bump, as if to alert me of their presence, just in case I’d missed them. Mumbling some incoherent prayer, I desperately searched for any crossroad up ahead but saw none. As far as my eyes could see, on both sides of the road, it was all just trees, trees, trees. Tall ones, too. Old ones with thick trunks. The kind of trees that could cause a car to crumple when struck, killing the person inside.
I screamed when the sedan hit me from behind again, this time even harder. Hard enough to make my teeth knock together and make me momentarily lose my grip on the steering wheel from the impact. Soon, if the sedan hit me again, I’d probably lose control of the car completely and go hurtling off into the trees. Whether by sick coincidence or some evil design that I didn’t have a clue about, I was about to experience my mom’s death firsthand. I just knew it.
Reflexively taking my foot off the gas after the impact of being hit, I suddenly had a realization. Kayley was wrong. I wasn’t a zombie. I did care about something. I cared if I lived. I don’t want to die, I thought, feeling like I’d just made a decision that had taken me a year.
CHAPTER FOUR
It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to die; it was happening. The sedan hit me again, so hard that I lost sight of the road when my head dropped forward from the impact, nearly hitting the steering wheel. I lost my grip momentarily, too, regaining it just in time to pull my car away from the ditch and pull it into the left lane to get out of the sedan’s direct path, too terrified that there might be an oncoming vehicle up ahead. I could only hope for that, actually. Maybe I could swerve to avoid it, and maybe the driver would see my emergency flashers and call for help.
It was when I swung into the left lane that I caught sight of something moving through the trees, parallel to the road. Not wanting to take my eyes off the road for more than half a second, I didn’t see much, and what I did see barely even registered. It was just a blur of something lighter than the bright green of the trees.
That was all I could gather. If I hadn’t been preparing for death and had time to make a guess, I might have guessed it was a deer. The forestlands of Michigan were full of them. I’d never seen any run about sixty miles an hour, though, which was how fast I was going after dropping my speed while swinging into the left lane.
When the sedan swung into the left lane behind me, I tried to zip back into the right lane to avoid being rear-ended again, but I wasn’t fast enough. Hearing the sound of rapid acceleration, I anticipated the jolt just a second before I felt it. And when I felt it, I knew it was all over. I had maybe a second or two to live.
With the steering wheel seeming to fly out of my hands, I lost control of the car, hit the brakes reflexively, and began spinning out, with the front of the car going to my left. I knew that in just one more heartbeat, I’d either hit the trees on my side of the car, or the car would roll. Either way, at the speed I’d been going before I’d started spinning out, I probably wasn’t going to make it.
I didn’t hit the trees, though, and the car didn’t roll. Instead, something else that I didn’t even fully understand happened. What it felt like was that the car had suddenly been stopped by something, though by what, I couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t something hard. Or, maybe it was, but the car hadn’t hit it hard. In that split second, I had a bizarre thought. The car was stopped by the hands of God.
A split second was all the time I had for this thought to register, because after that, I heard a calamitous crash and dared to open my eyes, which I hadn’t even realized I’d squeezed shut. Directly in front of my car, which was now facing the trees on the left side of the road, the sedan sat crumpled like an accordion, with its front bumper smashed into the side of a tall oak with a trunk at least three feet wide. Smoke was coming from the car’s engine, or what was left of the engine, anyway. The black car was so badly crumpled and mangled that I couldn’t imagine that any of its parts were still intact.
With my breath coming in rasping gasps, I only stared at the car for a moment, thinking that the occupant was surely dead, when something to my right caught my attention. Just out of the corner of my eye, I could tell that something was covering my passenger side window, something that was blocking most of t
he sunlight coming from that direction. Startled, I whipped my head to the right to look, and immediately found that I could barely even process what I was seeing. I certainly couldn’t make sense of it.
With his arms outstretched, one palm on the back-passenger side door, and the other palm pressed against the front of the car, a young man was standing, peering at me through the open passenger side window, looking like he was the one who’d “caught” my car to stop it. Looking like that was something that was even possible.
Reflexively, just because I was so terrified, disoriented, and startled, I screamed, although the sound didn’t last long. Maybe it was even more like a yelp than a scream. At any rate, I hadn’t been able to continue the noise, because my lungs felt curiously weak. And actually, my whole body felt curiously weak. However, this was mixed with a feeling of heart-pounding adrenaline, making me feel like I might be capable of gasping for breath and shaking from head-to-toe indefinitely, but nothing else.
In response to my startled, disoriented yelp, the young man holding my car lifted his dark brows just a degree. “You all right?”
I wasn’t at all. In fact, I was becoming further disoriented every second. With a strong jaw, full lips, and piercing blue eyes, the young man who’d come out of nowhere to “catch” my car was utterly gorgeous. Dizzyingly so, as if I hadn’t been dizzy enough already before setting eyes on him.
A hank of his tousled dark hair, so dark it was nearly black, hung rakishly over his forehead. I could tell he was tall, too, probably a few inches over six feet, and I could clearly see that he was well-muscled. Rounded biceps peeked out the sleeves of his plain white t-shirt, and I could see the outline of chiseled pecs through the thin cotton fabric.
He was definitely a full-grown man, although not a “dad-aged” man, like the age I usually associated with the word man. To call him a “boy” would have invited laughter from anyone who happened to overhear. He was just a “young man.”
To my friends, I might have referred to him as a “guy.” He was maybe in his early twenties, if I’d had to guess. Highlighting the fact that he’d long since left adolescence behind, his voice was rich and deep. My high school band director would have called it “chocolate-toned.”
In response to this young man’s question, asking me if I was all right, I said nothing, because I couldn’t. I’d just somehow lost my voice.
When I didn’t respond after a moment or two, he tried again, beginning to frown. “My name is Hayden, and I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to help you. Are you all right? Are you hurt anywhere?”
His piercing blue eyes were kind of hurting my heart right then in a way that I couldn’t quite understand, but as for my physical body, I didn’t feel any pain. And after a long moment, I was finally able to give my head a weak little shake and croak out a couple of words.
“I’m okay.”
“Good. Then just sit tight and close your eyes for a minute…unless you like gore.”
I couldn’t begin to fathom what Hayden could possibly mean by this, but then movement near the wrecked, smoking sedan made me turn my gaze to the front. Almost impossibly, a man was pulling himself out of the driver’s side window, clearly not only very much alive, but not even badly injured, from what I could tell.
His pale blue dress shirt was marred with a few spots of blood, and his rolled-up sleeves revealed a few small cuts on his forearms similar in size to a few cuts on his face, but that was it. When he got free of the car and stood, he appeared almost perfectly fine. He was at least fine enough to cast a dark scowl in my direction, instantly making me recall that he had been chasing me and had caused the crash. For a few moments, while I’d been looking into Hayden’s eyes, I’d almost forgotten about the whole thing.
I whipped my face toward my mysterious new friend who possessed mysterious car-stopping abilities, intending to tell him to call the police, but he wasn’t at my passenger side window anymore. In fact, I didn’t see him anywhere.
However, after just a split second, a sound like something between a yell and a growl made me pull my focus back to the front, gasping. Hayden had tackled the man in the pale blue dress shirt and now had him down on the ground in the ditch, pummeling his face. The force of Hayden’s blows was making jets of blood from the man’s nose shoot several feet in the air, and every one of his punches produced a sickening crack loud enough for me to hear from several feet away.
Thoroughly sickened, I closed my eyes as Hayden had instructed me to do, making a faint moan while I did so. I’d never had a very strong stomach, and now, with pregnancy-induced nausea added to the mix, I was beginning to feel like vomiting was an inevitability. Even if I could fight it, I knew I could only do so by not taking another single look at what was happening, and I resolved not to. However, after maybe just ten or twenty seconds, I felt like I couldn’t not look when I heard a shout, followed by a loud groan of pain that sounded like it had come from Hayden.
The man who’d been driving the sedan had somehow flipped Hayden onto his back and looked like he’d just landed a terrific blow to Hayden’s face. With my stomach churning with dread, I blinked, and just in that short amount of time, Hayden had somehow flipped his opponent off him. They began rolling all around the ditch, punching, kicking, and even briefly choking each other. After a minute or so, Hayden once again gained the upper hand.
When he began pummeling the other man’s face like he’d been doing earlier, making jets of blood spurt in the air, I once again closed my eyes, this time burying my face in my hands as well. Although this served to spare me from nausea-inducing images, I could still hear the sound of crunching bones when Hayden landed a punch, which made my stomach lurch each time. So, before long, I moved my hands to cover my ears, wincing.
Trying to take deep breaths in an attempt to steady my nerves and quell my nausea, I sat like this for I didn’t even know how long before feeling a light touch on my shoulder. Startled, I snapped my eyes open and uncovered my ears, and saw Hayden kind of casually leaning into my open driver’s side window a bit, one hand on the door and one on the roof, as if he hadn’t just been a participant in a brutal fight.
The only sign that he had been, was the blood spattered on his white t-shirt. A bit of blood was smeared all over his face, too, although it looked like he’d possibly wiped his face with his shirt in an attempt to clean it off. When he spoke, he wasn’t even breathing heavily.
“I need to go. I have another very pressing matter to deal with, and it can’t wait.”
“But….”
I had no idea what I was intending to say, but Hayden spoke again before I could say anything further anyway.
“The man who tried to hurt you is dead. Some of my family members will arrive soon to clean everything up. They’ll take you someplace safe, too. Just sit tight.”
None of what he was saying was computing in my mind. None of what had happened was computing. Feeling more confused and disoriented than I’d ever been in my life, I could only think of two questions for Hayden, which I asked in a shaky sort of voice, one right after the other.
“Who are you? Where did you come from?”
Standing up straight from his casual sort of lean against the window, Hayden was blunt in his response. “I don’t have time to answer those questions right now.”
Having a sudden thought, I asked him another question.
“Were you….” I paused, fighting a wave of dizziness. “Were you running through the woods before the car crash?”
“Yes. I figured the fewer vehicles involved in this whole mess, the better.”
“Well…how is it possible that you were running so fast? All I could see through the trees for a second was just like…a blur of something.”
“Well, I’m a fast runner, Sydney. I have to go now.”
With that, he sprinted away from my car, heading toward the woods, too fast for me to ask him how he knew my name.
*
Still trembling and in a complete state
of shock, I rested my forehead on the steering wheel once Hayden was out of view. I stayed in this position for a couple of minutes, hardly even thinking, just trying to focus on taking deep, steadying breaths and listening to the calming sound of birdsong, until I heard the faint sound of an approaching vehicle.
Wondering if it was just a random vehicle coming up the back-country road, or the family members that Hayden had spoken of, I lifted my face from the steering wheel just in time to see a midnight blue SUV approaching. When it neared my car, it slowed to a stop, and immediately, a girl about my age bounded out, asking if I was okay.
The girl was tallish, and slender, and wore her long brown hair in a ponytail. Her oval-shaped face, which radiated concern, also seemed to radiate trustworthiness to me for some reason. I knew that just because a person had a trustworthy sort of face, that didn’t necessarily mean that they were trustworthy; but at any rate, this girl’s presence at the scene of the crash and the ensuing carnage instantly made me start to feel better. However, as to her question, I wasn’t sure I knew what “okay” even felt like anymore.
When she reached the driver’s side door, she again asked me if I was okay, and I finally managed to nod.
“I’m okay. Just a little….”
I was going to say something like “rattled,” or “shaken up,” but before I was able to, a giant lump formed in my throat, making me unable to continue, even after trying to swallow it down.
Seeming to intuit what I’d been going to say anyway, the girl winced slightly with her expression full of sympathy. “Of course. Of course, you’re probably a little shaken up. I can’t even imagine everything you’ve been through today.”