Season's Meetings

by Amy Dunne

  As she drew the seat belt across, Holly said, “I’m going to park by the main terminal.”

  Catherine gave a nod. Holly started the engine and carefully drove them. Unlike the relatively deserted petrol station, this car park was brightly lit and held many cars. Lots of people were braving the weather to scurry inside the building.

  Holly pulled on her coat, and then turned to Catherine. “Fancy getting a coffee and something to eat? It’s my treat.”

  “Shouldn’t we continue driving?”

  “I think we should eat something substantial, and I need a coffee. Just half an hour and then we’ll get back on the road.”

  Catherine was about to protest when her stomach growled loudly. Holly laughed and so Catherine gave up being stubborn. What was the point? She could sit sulking in the car while Holly went inside, but that’d only waste petrol. Plus she was ravenous.

  “Okay. Half an hour and then we leave. I’m worried about the storm.”

  “Me too.” Holly grimaced. “Come on. The sooner we get in there, the sooner we can get back on the road.”

  The fragrance of strong coffee welcomed them as they stepped into the lively, warm entrance. They quickly found a coffee shop and ordered their drinks and a bacon sandwich each. True to her word, Holly insisted on paying. Not spoiling for another fight, Catherine graciously accepted and found them a table. A few minutes later, Holly presented their food and drinks. They settled into a slightly awkward silence. The nourishment seemed to perk them both up.

  Holly wiped her mouth on a napkin and tossed it onto her empty plate. “I’m sorry about before.”

  Catherine drained the dregs of her coffee and waved a hand. “Let’s forget about it.”

  Holly looked relieved. “I’m going to nip to the restroom and then we should probably go. It’s starting to get light and I’d like to get as far as possible before we meet traffic.”

  *

  Daylight eventually arrived but was kept hostage behind a sky full of thick, menacing clouds. Snow relentlessly fell, and a breeze picked up. Surprisingly, the roads were full of drivers who’d chosen not to heed the warnings.

  Conversation had become stilted and so they drove for a while in silence. It was only when one of the large motorway signs warned of a hazard three junctions ahead that Catherine spoke.”Should I put the radio on?”

  “Yeah,” Holly said, her face etched with worry.

  After a few attempts at retuning and avoiding yet more Christmas songs, Catherine settled on a local travel station. The news wasn’t good. A pileup had occurred at the aforementioned junction, and traffic was at a total standstill. The presenter read a warning issued by the police and highway patrol. Drivers were advised to steer clear of the junction and find an alternative route. Although emergency services were reportedly at the scene, the scale of the pileup and the adverse weather conditions were creating more problems. It was unlikely the road would be clear before the worst of the storm hit.

  “Shit,” Holly said. She nervously drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “What do we do?”

  “Take the next exit.” Catherine was fighting her own panic, but told herself it was vital Holly remain as calm as possible. She turned off the radio. “We’ll find a safe place to pull up and we’ll re-evaluate everything.”

  It seemed to work. Holly steered the car into the queue of slow-moving traffic. After finally breaking away, she drove them to a nearby residential street and parked up. She left the engine running.

  They watched a group of five children playing in a large front garden of one of the houses. Three of them were having a snowball fight and two others were rolling a large snowball for presumably the body of a snowman. Brandishing rosy cheeks and red noses, they looked cold and snotty, but happy. As far as they were concerned, the snow was a plaything.

  Catherine recovered the map and began riffling through the pages.

  “I don’t know what we should do,” Holly said, nibbling on a thumbnail.

  “We’re here,” Catherine said. She pointed to an area of the map. Using her index finger, she led a trail upward and then stopped. “This is where Beth’s house is.”

  It didn’t look too far. But then the map didn’t account for the motorway being closed, the imminent storm, and the already adverse driving conditions.

  “Is there an alternative route we could take?” Holly asked. She was now clutching at the drawstrings of her hoodie.

  Catherine retraced the trail backward, this time cutting out the motorway. “Yes. It’ll add maybe another hour to the journey, but it takes us where we need to go.”

  “I don’t know if we should risk it.” Holly rubbed her face with her trembling hands. “But then what would we do instead? We’ve come so far and it’s too late to turn back.”

  “We need to decide quickly,” Catherine said. She noticed the breeze had turned into a blustery wind sweeping the snowflakes into a hypnotic swirling vortex.

  Holly searched around the car, opening various compartments until she found what she was looking for. She held up a shiny coin. “I say we toss this to decide. Heads we carry on. Tails we try to find a hotel or some other place to wait it out.”

  “You can’t be serious?”

  “Have a better idea?”

  “It’s so immature.”

  Holly pursed her lips and rolled her eyes defensively. “It’s quick and it makes the decision for us. Right, here we go.” She flipped the coin off her thumb and they both watched as it somersaulted in the air before landing safely in her palm. Glancing at Catherine, she asked, “Ready?”

  Catherine’s stomach was tied up in knots. Were they really leaving this mammoth decision, a decision that could lead to a matter of life and death, to the outcome of a coin toss? It was ridiculous.

  The question must have been rhetorical because Holly slowly opened her fist. They both peered down. Heads.

  “We carry on,” Holly said in an emotionless tone. “Unless you want to do best out of three?”

  Catherine swallowed down her growing nausea. “Let’s go. We can’t afford to waste any more time.”

  Holly shoved the coin into one of her pockets. She checked her mirrors and began doing a slow three-point turn. “I hope you’re good with directions.”

  “So do I.”

  *

  For the next ninety minutes, the road conditions were surprisingly decent and they made good progress. The snowflakes fell thicker and faster, but neither of them chose to mention it.

  Catherine was secretly impressed with how well they were working together. Having the job of navigating kept her mind occupied and her nerves at bay.

  “We’re on this road for quite a while,” she said, placing the map in her lap, as Holly gave a grunt affirming she’d heard her. She looked out her window. There was no denying the Scottish countryside was stunning. She could make out rolling, snow-covered hillsides, the backdrop to the sparse white fields, hedgerow, and scattered trees.

  It didn’t take long for an increasing unease to creep over Catherine. The sky had grown unnaturally dark for daytime. The oppressing clouds descended like a fog, blanketing the distant and not-so-distant scenery with worrying speed. Where only a little while ago Catherine had seen the shapes of the hillsides, now her view was nothing but white.

  As if sensing her distress, Holly slowed the car’s speed. She hovered on the edge of her seat, her nose practically touching the glass of the windscreen. The loud howling from the wind sounded almost animalistic as it pelted the glass with thick snowflakes. The wipers speedily swiped, but to no avail. Visibility was minimal. It didn’t help that the road was deserted. All the while they’d been travelling along it, they hadn’t passed another vehicle, house, farm, or even sign.

  “I can barely see,” Holly said in high-pitched tone. Her panic was palpable.

  Catherine opened her mouth to speak, but the car lurched and the back end skidded out.

  “Shit!” Holly said. Her hands held onto the wheel f
ighting to keep control. The car slid to a stop at a diagonal angle splayed across both lanes.

  Breathing hard and eyes wide, Holly turned to Catherine. “I don’t know what to do. I can barely make out anything in front of us. This road is dangerous. I’m scared I’m going to lose control.”

  Terror clutched Catherine in an icy grip. She didn’t have any answers or words to instil confidence. Her rationality was overwhelmed by her terror.

  We’re going to die. We’re going to die.

  “Catherine.” Holly reached out, but Catherine flinched at her touch. “You’re so pale. What can I do?”

  Foreboding unlike anything Catherine had ever known weighed down on her, crushing her with its intensity. She sensed, no, knew instinctively something bad was going to happen. It went beyond feeling it in her gut. This was so strong and clear.

  “Catherine?”

  Fear reverberated down Catherine’s spine as if each vertebra was being played like a glockenspiel. She could only manage to draw short, wheezy breaths, and with each gasped exhale, her own panic tightened its grip around her chest, crushing her ribcage and constricting the breath from her body.

  “We can’t stay in the middle of the road like this. It’s not safe. I’m going to drive slowly, and the next town or house we come across, we’ll seek shelter,” Holly said. She found the gear she needed and slowly accelerated. “We’re going to be okay.”

  Catherine opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t find the words and didn’t have the breath to verbalise her thoughts. Hot tears spilled down her cheeks as she helplessly waited for the inevitable.

  The wind had worked itself up into a raging, roaring gale. It bore down on the car, hammering the battered shell and glass with snow and ice. A mixed array of unhealthy clattering and creaking sounds were forced from the car as the wind engulfed it, seemingly intent on finding some way to rip it apart.

  The temperature had plummeted. The car’s heat blasted out on full, but wisps of steamy breath materialised from both of them. Outside, the world was greyish white, as if the thickest fog imaginable had descended over the earth. Catherine couldn’t make out anything, not a fleeting glance of the road ahead or surrounding countryside. They could be heading straight for a brick wall or another car and they wouldn’t know until it was too late.

  A violent gust of wind struck Catherine’s side of the car with such force she was certain the car would flip over. Holly slammed on the brakes and pulled up the handbrake, but the car continued to blow across the road, inch by stinted inch.

  “G-go,” Catherine said, as soon as the gust died off a little. If Holly noticed the stutter she didn’t show it. She was probably too distracted by the current situation—a tiny blessing.

  Catherine clenched her fists and tried to drum up some self-control. Her mouth was dry, and she gently bit down on the tip of her tongue, subconsciously preventing any more stuttering.

  It’d been years since she’d last stuttered, although she’d come close at Granny Birch’s funeral. During times of intense stress or emotion, her stutter threatened to return—which was infuriating, because obviously whatever she was going through at the time was stressful enough, and the unwanted addition of her stutter only made things a million times worse.

  Perhaps it was a one-off? A different thought snapped her attention back to her most pressing concern. If you’re about to die, then yeah, it probably was a one-off. Happy now? That was enough of a jolt of reality to give her perspective. Stuttering was the least of her worries.

  Holly had put the car in motion again, and Catherine tried to consider their options. It was paramount they stay in the car. The chances of them coming across a town, house, or farm, were slim, especially as visibility was so dire, but that was their only real chance of survival. They had to keep moving slowly, because if they stopped on the road, they would be a sitting duck, and the chances of a collision would be ridiculously high.

  Catherine turned to tell Holly her thoughts but stalled. Whether psychological or not, she could feel the niggling compulsion that used to accompany her stutter. It had always been there balancing on the tip of her tongue, the infuriating whispered threat of possibly stalling, sticking, and splitting the simplest of words. In her mind she could see every syllable of the words she wanted to say, hear the sounds, and know the feel of them in her mouth, but somewhere between knowing and saying, the compulsion would take hold and wreak havoc.

  Refusing to become a slave to her old rival, she took a deep breath, opened her mouth, and said, “Holly—”

  The car gave a sudden violent jolt as the right front tyre struck something hard. Holly flattened the brake pedal but caused the back tyres to lock. As both Catherine’s and Holly’s screams conjoined in a eerie kind of harmony, the car lurched into a spin. With total loss of control Holly uselessly pawed at the wheel. Their momentum was predetermined, and as the car slid into a freewheel skid, they both braced themselves a little too late.

  The front tyres hit something, and with an audible crack the bonnet raised high. Gravity came into play and brought the front of the car crashing down. Before Catherine fully clenched her eyes shut, she became aware of two things: firstly, they were descending, and secondly, for the first time since the whiteout had struck, she glimpsed something imminently ahead.

  A deafening sound of screeching metal sounded before the car came to an abrupt stop. Momentum threw Catherine’s and Holly’s bodies forward. Catherine had been right: no airbags. The dashboard greeted them with a brutal smack. The car plunged into darkness as the power cut out.

  Catherine’s head painfully ricocheted off the dashboard before her body was flung back in the seat. With double vision swimming before her, she blindly felt her face for her glasses, which had wonkily slumped down the bridge of her nose. Pushing them back up into their rightful position did nothing to improve her vision. She started to roll her head to the side, but came to a wincing stop as a stab of pain shot from her neck down to her shoulder. Hissing mumbled swear words, she turned her head a little farther, grimacing against the pain. She needed to check on Holly.

  Holly’s limp body lay draped over the steering wheel with no signs of movement.

  Catherine tried to move but was restricted by disorientating pain and weakness. As she reached a shaky hand toward Holly, a wave of vertigo assaulted her and she dropped her arm pathetically to her side. A barrage of jumbled thoughts and emotions streamed through her mind until she passed out.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The shaking of her pained shoulder was enough to make Catherine open her eyes. Groggily, she tried to make sense of what was happening. Where was she? What had happened? Why was she in so much pain?

  “Catherine, you’re awake. Thank God. You scared the shit out of me.”

  Squinting because of the pounding headache residing over her right eye, Catherine slowly turned her head. Holly stared at her with red puffy eyes, her face unnaturally pale and tear-stained, and her hair stood out in utter disarray.

  “I thought you were in a coma or worse,” Holly said. She added a forced nervous laugh.

  Catherine tentatively lifted her fingertips to her forehead to explore the place where most of the throbbing pain was coming from. A large swollen lump now occupied the place where her forehead used to be.

  “Yeah, it looks nasty,” Holly said, grimacing. “You were out for a few minutes. How are you feeling? Any other injuries?”

  Catherine went to shake her head, but let out an involuntary cry as her neck flared in pain. She tried to massage the pain away.

  “Whiplash,” Holly said quietly. “I’ve got it, too.”

  Everything came flooding back and a sense of urgency overtook Catherine’s injuries. In a shaky voice she asked, “Are y-you okay?” Her gaze travelled over Holly’s face and body looking for signs of trauma.

  “I’m a bit battered and bruised, but other than that I’m fine.”

  Relieved, Catherine had to agree from her appearance Holly did seem
okay. Turning her attention to the next priority, she took her time to look around the car. The power was back on, giving them essential light and heat but also suggesting the engine may not have suffered as badly as she originally feared.

  The windscreen was covered in a thick layer of snow, so seeing what was on the other side of the glass wasn’t possible. Catherine wasn’t sure if this might be a blessing for the time being. There was a deep crevice in the glass on Holly’s side of the windscreen where something had struck with force. An intricate design of tiny cracks crept out from the chipped centre, resembling a spider web.

  Catherine’s side window was covered in snow and so was Holly’s, which also prevented them from seeing out. The car itself had come to a standstill in a slightly awkward position: the front was in a perpetual nosedive, while the back end remained raised. They were definitely stuck in some kind of ditch. She peered over the back of the seat only to find the back windscreen was as obstructed by snow as all of the others.

  “What do we do now?” Holly asked. Her eyes remained puddled with unshed tears as she shrunk farther down into her hoodie.

  Catherine unbuckled her seat belt and reached behind her to grab her handbag. She rooted inside and pulled out her phone. As she switched it on and watched it come to life, her stomach dropped. No signal. Not even half a bar.

  Following suit, Holly fumbled in her pocket and produced her phone. Catherine watched the flicker of hope extinguish from Holly’s face. “No signal,” she said.

  As the car creaked and groaned from the raging gale outside, Catherine considered their next option. No signal meant no help. Not that she would’ve been able to give the emergency services an exact pinpoint on their whereabouts anyway.

  They would have to save themselves. They needed to get out of this ditch and back onto the road where someone might drive by and rescue them. It was a slim chance, but it was the only one they had.

  “We need to g-get back up onto the road. B-buckle up and try reversing.”

  “I can’t see a thing. I don’t know how steep this ditch is. I don’t know how far the road is. What if I hit something else while driving blind and damage the car or put us in worse danger? Shouldn’t we stay here and wait to be rescued?”