large truck was halted at an angle across two lanes, just fifty or sixty
feet in front of them.
Lindsey tried to say, oh God, but her voice was locked within her.
While making a delivery to one of the area ski resorts, the trucker
evidently had been surprised by the blizzard, which had set in only a
short while ago but half a day ahead of the forecasters’ predictions.
Without benefit of snow chains, the big truck tires churned
ineffectively on the icy pavement as the driver struggled desperately to
bring his rig around and get it moving again.
Cursing under his breath but otherwise as controlled as ever, Hatch
eased his foot down on the brake pedal. He dared not jam it to the
floor and risk sending the Honda into a deadly spin.
In response to the glare of the car headlights, the trucker looked
through his side window. Across the rapidly closing gap of night and
snow, Lindsey saw nothing of the man’s face but a pallid oval and twin
charry holes where the eyes should have been, a ghostly countenance, as
if some malign spirit was at the wheel of that vehicle. Or Death
himself Hatch was heading for the outermost of the two ascending lanes,
the only part of the highway not blocked.
Lindsey wondered if other traffic was coming uphill, hidden from them by
the truck. Even at reduced speed, if they collided headn, they would
not survive.
In spite of Hatch’s best efforts, the Honda began to slide. The tail
end came around to the left, and Lindsey found herself swinging away
from the stranded truck. The smooth, greasy, out-of control motion was
like the transition between scenes in a bad dream. Her stomach twisted
with nausea, and although she was restrained by a safety harness, she
instinctively pressed her right hand against the door and her left
against the dashboard, bracing herself.
“Hang on,” Hatch said, turning the wheel where the car wanted to go,
which was his only hope of regaining control.
But the slide became a sickening spin, and the Honda rotated three
hundred and sixty degrees, as if it were a carousel without callio:
around .around.. . until the truck began to come into view again. For
an instant, as they glided downhill, still turning, Lindsey was certain
the car would slip safely past the other vehicle. She could see beyond
the big rig now, and the road below was free of traffic.
Then the front bumper on Hatch’s side caught the back of the truck.
Tortured metal shrieked.
The Honda shuddered and seemed to explode away from the point of
collision, slamming backward into the guardrail. Lindsey’s teeth
clacked together hard enough to ignite sparks of pain in her jaws, all
the way into her temples, and the hand braced against the dashboard bent
painfully at the wrist. Simultaneously, the strap of the shoulder
harness, which stretched diagonally across her chest from right shoulder
to left hip, abruptly cinched so tight that her breath burst from her.
The car rebounded from the guardrail, not with sufficient momentum to
reconnect with the truck but with so much torque that it pivoted three
hundred and sixty degrees again. As they spun-glided past the truck,
Hatch fought for control, but the steering wheel jerked erratically back
and forth, tearing through his hands so violently that he cried out as
his palms were abraded.
Suddenly the moderate gradient appeared precipitously steep, like the
water-greased spillway of an amusement-park flume ride. Lindsey would
have screamed if she could have drawn breath. But although the safety
strap had loosened, a diagonal line of pain still cut across her chest,
making it impossible to inhale. Then she was rattled by a vision of the
Honda skating in a long glissade to the next bend in the road, crashing
through the guardrail, tumbling out into the void-and the image was so
horrifying that it was like a blow, knocking breath back into her.
As the Honda came out of the second rotation, the entire driver’s side
slammed into the guardrail, and they slid thirty or forty feet without
losing contact. To the accompaniment of a grinding-screeching-scraping