Helltown (7 page)

When Steve realized he wasn’t dead, and when his shock subsided, he heard moaning from behind him. “Jen?” he said. “Mandy?” He tried to crane his neck around to check on them, and that’s when he saw Jeff in the darkened cabin, crawling through a hole in the windshield. Then he realized Jeff wasn’t crawling; his lower body was ragdoll limp.

Steve couldn’t see the upper half of his friend, the half that had been launched through the windshield, because the glass had gone gummy and opaque with cracks.

“Fuck Jeff,” Steve mumbled. “You stupid fucking fuck…”

“Steve?” Mandy said shrilly. “What’s wrong? What happened to Jeff? Is he dead?
Is he dead?
”

Steve unclasped his seatbelt and collapsed onto the car’s ceiling. He twisted himself around so he could see Mandy and Jenny. They were both layered in shadows, hanging upside down like bats. Mandy was sobbing into her hands. Jenny was either unconscious or dead.

In the distance came the unmistakable drone of an approaching vehicle. The hearse coming back for them?

Steve maneuvered his body in the awkward space so he could grasp the door handle. He tugged it. The door was stuck.

Tires screeched to a halt.

Steve drove his heels into the window. The glass spider webbed. He kicked it again, harder, and again, harder still, until his feet stamped through it. He rolled onto his hands and knees and scrambled through the shattered window. He heard branches snapping, vegetation crackling, and he was suddenly filled with an exquisite terror, sure the driver of the hearse was going to be something with a hole for a face and leathery wings and—

Austin shouted Jeff’s name; Noah, Steve’s.

“Here!” Steve managed, standing and swooning into the upturned car. Austin and Noah and Cherry burst through the thicket. They came to an abrupt standstill.

“Oh no,” Austin said, those two words barely audible but powerful enough to halt a marching band. “No, no, no…”

Steve pushed himself away from the car on splintered pegs for legs and faced the wreckage. In the frosty light he could see it clearly enough. Jeff’s head and shoulders protruded from the windshield like a half-eaten meal. He lay on his back. Given that the vehicle rested upside-down on top of him, his nose kissed the hood.

Noah brushed past Steve, dropped to his knees, and pried open the back door. He climbed in and spoke calmly to Mandy while attempting to extract her.

Steve wobbled around the front of the car—the BMW’s distinctive headlights and kidney-shaped grille were an unrecognizable mash of metal—and all but collapsed next to Jenny’s door. Blood smeared the window. He gripped the handle and pulled, expecting the door to be stuck. It swung open with ease. He felt one of Jenny’s dangling wrists for a pulse, but his hands were shaking too badly to perform this action correctly. He unbuckled her seatbelt, lowered her body into his arms, then dragged her out onto the leaf litter. The fog billowed around her, caressed her. He noticed her chest moving up and down and said a silent prayer of thanks.

Meanwhile, Austin had crawled into the gap beneath the hood and now he shouted, “Jeff’s alive! He’s breathing!”

While Noah and Austin discussed what to do next in urgent tones, Steve patted Jenny on the cheek, urging her to wake up. All the while his heart was filled with guilt. He had invited her on this trip. She had wanted to spend the weekend studying, but he’d insisted they needed a break from school, he’d wanted her to finally meet his friends, and now here she was, lying on the damp earth, bloody and broken.

Her eyes fluttered open.

“Jenny!” he said. “Thank God! Are you okay?”

“Okay…”

“You hit your head.”

“Hurts…”

“It’s just a little—”

The rest of the sentence died on his lips.

He could smell gasoline.

Gas? Jenny thought slowly. What was Steve talking about? Were people camping nearby?

“We have to move away from the car,” Steve was telling her now, though it remained difficult to hear him through the ringing in her ears. “I’m going to carry you.”

“I can…okay…”

Steve helped her to her feet. Pain flared in the left side of her head. She almost toppled over, but Steve caught her in his arms.

“Let me carry you,” he insisted.

“No, I…” She couldn’t find the right word. “Just…dizzy.”

Jenny allowed him to lead her away from the wreckage. Without warning her trembling legs gave out beneath her. She dropped to her knees. Steve was saying something to her, though the words seemed suddenly far away. Her vision blurred, darkened—and then she was floating above her body, which was lying on the operation table in the cadaver lab, nude and lifeless. Nine fellow students were gathered around the table, everyone wearing brown lab coats and dishwashing gloves to protect against formaldehyde. Nobody seemed shocked or saddened that Jenny was the cadaver today. Professor Booth was giving some sort of eulogy in Latin that she couldn’t understand. She wanted to tell them she wasn’t dead, but she couldn’t speak, only hover, insubstantial, like a ghost.

Belinda Collins stepped to the table. She was one of the gunners in the class, ambitious to a fault. Ever since Jenny scored higher than her on their first assignment, Belinda had done her best to make life miserable for Jenny, and Jenny knew she would be thrilled to be performing the dissection.

Belinda raised her scalpel to make the first incision. Jenny squeezed her eyes shut against the anticipated pain. She felt nothing. Surprised, she opened her eyes again. The cadaver lab had disappeared, replaced by a cold night filled with nacreous fog and towering trees.

“Jen? Jen!” Steve said. “Can you hear me?” He was cradling her head in his lap.

“Where…?” she said, disorientated. Then she remembered with a punch of dread: the hearse, the accident. “Jeff? Mandy?”

“Mandy’s fine. Jeff’s…okay. I have to go help get him out of the car. Are you going to be all right for a couple minutes?”

She tried to sit up. It took all her strength, but she managed. She saw the upside-down BMW for the first time. Mandy and Cherry stood on one side of it, Noah and Austin on the other. Everyone was speaking and gesturing wildly.

“Where’s Jeff?” she asked.

“He’s still inside the car,” Steve said. “I’ll be right back—” He frowned.

“What?” she said.

“How do you feel?”

“Pummeled.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Two. Steve, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. You hit your head though. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

Yet the concern that had appeared on his face a few moments ago was still there. She suddenly wondered whether she’d been disfigured somehow. She touched her lips, her nose. “What’s wrong with me, Steve?”

“Nothing.”

“Steve!”

“Nothing—it’s just your eyes. One’s dilated a bit more than the other. Probably nothing more than a mild TBI. It’s not a big deal.”

Jenny went cold. A traumatic brain injury. If it was indeed mild, she had nothing to worry about. But Steve had no way of knowing whether it was mild or not. It could very easily be moderate or severe. She could have intracranial hemorrhage or brain herniation, both of which could lead to disability or even death. She’d need a CT scan to determine the true extent of her injury.

Noah and Austin, she noticed, had started working to get Jeff out of the BMW. Jenny said, “Go help them.”

Steve glanced at the car, then back to her. “You’re not going to pass out again, are you?”

“No.”

“Because you can’t pass out—”

“I know! Now go. I’m fine.”

He hesitated, nodded, and hurried off.

Steve reached Noah and Austin just as they were easing Jeff out of the mangled cab and onto the ground. Bloody lacerations raked Jeff’s face in a dozen places. Several of them appeared deep enough to require stitches. A chunk of glass was embedded in his left cheek like a grisly jewel.

“We have to move him farther away from the car,” Steve said.

Noah shook his head. “I don’t think we should move him anywhere.”

“Can’t you smell the gas?”

Noah and Austin raised their noses and sniffed, like prairie dogs trying to catch wind of prey.

“Shit, you’re right!” Austin said. He eyed the car apprehensively. “You think it might explode?”

“No,” Steve said simply. He didn’t know much about cars, but he was pretty sure you’d have to shove a torch into the gas tank for something as dramatic as an explosion to happen. But the fact they could smell gas meant the seam between the fuel tank and the rest of the fuel system had been broken, or the fuel lines had been sheared. Either way, gas was leaking from somewhere, and an electrical spark could turn it into a full-out blaze.

He faced Mandy, who had come around the vehicle. She was knuckling her mouth and staring at Jeff, her complexion bloodless. “Mandy, give us a hand moving him,” he told her.

She didn’t respond.

“Mandy!”

She blinked, pulled her eyes away from Jeff. “What?”

“We need help moving Jeff.”

Abruptly flames whooshed to life in the BMW’s engine.

“It’s gonna blow!” Austin cried hysterically. “Grab him!”

Steve took Jeff’s arms, Noah and Austin his legs, and they dragged Jeff twenty feet from the burning wreckage to where Steve had brought Jenny—only now she was on her side, eyes closed, limbs askew.

“Jen!” Steve dropped Jeff’s arms and dashed over to her. “Jen? Jen!” He turned to the others. “We have to get her and Jeff to the hospital. Now!”

“Do you know where it is?” Noah asked.

“Someone in town can tell us.” He scooped Jenny into his arms and stood. “You guys carry Jeff.”

Noah and Cherry grasped Jeff’s legs, Austin and Mandy, his arms. On the count of three they lifted him off the ground. However, they only made it a few steps this time when Jeff’s eyes flailed open and he screamed.

“Set him down!” Steve ordered.

They rested Jeff on his back. He continued to scream with tremendous force. When he expelled the last of the air from his lungs, he began to hyperventilate. His eyes, glossy and as wide as silver dollars, stared at the black sky overhead.

“Jeff?” Steve said. He’d set Jenny down on the ground and was bending over his friend. “Jeff? Can you hear me?”

“It hurts!” Jeff bleated through clenched teeth. “It hurts it hurts it hurts!”

“Where does it hurt?” Steve asked him. The calmness in his voice didn’t match the panic chilling his blood.

“Back…my back…” Jeff’s face had flushed liver pink. It was sheathed in perspiration. The tendons in his neck were bunched into ropey cords.

Steve took Jeff’s hand, as if they were shaking, and instructed him to squeeze it.

Jeff let loose another choked scream and crushed Steve’s hand in his. He squeezed tighter and screamed louder before falling abruptly silent. His eyes slid closed. His grip slackened.

Steve snatched his hand back and clenched and unclenched it against his chest.

“What the hell was that?” Austin said, running his hands through his Mohawk. The wildness in his eyes made him appear ten years older.

“He said his back,” Mandy mumbled. Tears streaked her cheeks, while her hands were clamped over her ears, as if in anticipation of more screams. “Did he break it?”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“But he squeezed your hand,” Austin said. “So he’s not paralyzed, right? At least he’s not paralyzed?”

“He could be from the waist down,” Steve said.

“Don’t say that,” Mandy whispered.

“It’s not going to change the fact if he is.”

She sobbed and turned away.

“Maybe we did it,” Austin blurted. “We moved him. You’re not supposed to move someone with a broken back. Maybe we made it worse.”

“If we left him in the car,” Steve said, “he would be dead right now.”

They all glanced at the burning BMW. Stout yellow and orange flames now engulfed the entire vehicle, feeding off the foam and leather seats and other combustible items. Grayish smoke streamed upward into the black night.

Noah broke the silence. “How are we going to move him now?” he said quietly.

“We’re not,” Steve said. “Austin, Mandy, Cherry—you guys stay here with Jeff. Noah and I will take Jenny to the hospital and bring help back.”