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СКАЧАТЬ into the skid, then almost immediately straightened the wheel.

      It worked. The rear end skated around a bit, but I’d reclaimed control. I rounded the treacherous curve, safe and sound. And through the murk of rain and sleet saw a long black whip snapping through the air. Straight at me.

      A power cable. Live.

      If I’d had time to think, I might have risked it. Or maybe not. The truck was grounded, but the cable might have busted my windshield and smacked me in the face with 13,600 volts. But there wasn’t time then for thought, or even fear. Just action. I jerked the wheel left and hit the brakes.

      Big mistake.

      The truck began to spin, slick as greased Teflon. I yanked my foot off the brakes. The power cable reached the end of its arc a foot short of my bumper. I steered into the spin, more than willing to turn all the way around and head back the way I’d come.

      The damned truck just kept sliding sideways.

      The guard rails. I hadn’t seen any damage. Maybe—

      The rear of the truck thudded up against them. And stopped. The front slewed around. Jolted. And kept on going.

      Even then I didn’t think about dying. Didn’t think at all, just flung the door open, responding to the screaming need to get out of there. But it was too late, too late to do anything but topple with the truck as it went over the edge and flipped.

      Metal screeched. I turned into an object trying to bounce off the crumpling trap of the truck’s cab. It was as if the darkness itself pummeled me with a giant’s fist, and then a hard blow on my head—then silence. Stillness. I lay beneath a whole mountain of hurt listening to someone moan.

      That irritated me. What business did this bozo have moaning when I was the one with the mountain on me? I opened my mouth to tell him to shut up. The moaning stopped.

      Something in that cause-and-effect sequence woke a few brain cells. That had been me moaning, and I was…I was…in my truck. Only I was hanging at a funny angle.

      I blinked. My right eyelid felt gummy. Slowly I put together the pressure across my pelvis and chest, the glow of the dash lights and the stillness. The nose of the truck was pointed down, but the pitch wasn’t too steep.

      I was alive. And I was hurt.

      How bad? I couldn’t tell. The pain itself addled me, made it hard to think. But my head…yeah, I remembered getting hit there. Instinctively I lifted my hand to see what touch could tell me. My shoulder exploded. Pain nearly sucked me down. I lay draped over my seat belt and shoulder harness and panted.

      Okay, obviously my shoulder was hurt, too. Pretty bad.

      Over the soft sound of rain I heard a creaking sound. A prickle of alarm made me lift my head. And rap it against something.

      It didn’t take long for me to run out of breath for cursing. Or to figure out the problem: the roof of the truck was caved in. I couldn’t straighten my head.

      My breath came faster. Slowly I turned my head to the right. Shards of glass glittered on the seat beside me. I couldn’t see outside because light turned the starred surface of the glass opaque.

      How about that. The headlights were still on. I looked to the left.

      The door was bashed in.

      Deep breaths, I told myself. Panic won’t help. I wiggled the fingers on my left hand, then cautiously moved that arm. All right so far. With equal care I shifted my legs. Okay, good. I had three out of four limbs operational. I’d survived a tumble down a mountain and I was hurt, but I was alive, dammit. And I wasn’t trapped. I could get out.

      Getting out was a bitch.

      The buckle to the seat belt was slippery and wet, but I got it undone, then needed to get my breath. Which was ridiculous, of course, but…my jeans were soaked. My jacket, too. And beneath the jacket my shirt stuck to me, warm and wet.

      An awful lot of my blood was outside of me instead of inside.

      That scared me. I reached for the door handle. My first tug didn’t do a damned thing.

      Fear hit, sweeping everything else out of the way. Pain didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but getting out. I jerked on the handle as hard as I could, throwing my weight against it.

      Metal shrieked. The door swung open and I fell out. I managed to thrust one leg out to catch myself, but the jolt as my foot hit the ground set off a charge in my shoulder that toppled my whole system.

      I didn’t black out. Quite. But for a while there was nothing but a red, roaring monster eating my thoughts before they could form. Eventually I noticed how cold and wet the ground was. It was a lot colder out here than in the truck. Wetter, too. Maybe getting out hadn’t been such a great move, but I was here now. What came next?

      The road. I had to get to the road. Not much traffic this time of night, but sooner or later that downed power line would attract attention.

      Dragging myself to a sitting position left me clammy, but I made it and looked up the way the truck and I had come. Only I couldn’t see the road. Too dark, and the rain didn’t help. How far had I fallen?

      I fought back a wave of despair. I knew where the road was—up. So that’s where I would go.

      First I used my left hand to tuck my right one into the pocket of my jacket. There were trees, mostly pines. Not much in the way of underbrush, and the truck’s passage had cleared a path through what did exist. Good. In a battle between me and a clump of weeds right then, the weeds would win.

      Standing was out, so hand-and-knees it was. I started moving.

      Gwen had once told me that women forget how much childbirth hurts. She made a joke of it, saying that was how nature tricked them into a repeat performance. I didn’t understand then. I’d heard women swapping war stories, and it seemed to me they remembered labor pretty well.

      Now I know what she meant. I remember that I hurt. Every inch up that slope equaled a yard or two of pain. But the pain itself isn’t there anymore, just the imprint it left behind.

      When you hurt enough, you lose hold of past and future. Like a baby or a beast, all you have is right now. I lost the knack of connecting all those nows in the usual way, like beads on a string. So some beads got lost. Others stayed stuck inside me, like a splinter the flesh has grown up around.

      One of the beads that got stuck was the moment my truck finished falling.

      I hadn’t thought about what halted the truck’s fall. Maybe that knowledge had squirmed around underneath, and that’s why the creaking sound had alarmed me, why I’d been so frantic to get out. The second I heard that sharp, wooden crack, I knew what it meant. I craned my head to look behind me.

      Branches snapped. Glass broke, and the headlights went out at last. A tangled mass of truck and tree, their shapes merged by darkness and disaster, toppled slowly, then crashed its way down the mountain. I blinked, swaying on my knees and one good hand like a suspension bridge in the wind.

      That had been a damned fine truck.

      I didn’t СКАЧАТЬ