might bleed to death while she was unconscious and unable to help him.
She reached out blindly and found him crumpled in the driver’s seat.
His head was bent toward her, resting against his own shoulder. She
touched his face, and he did not move. Something warm and sticky
covered his right cheek and temple. Blood. From a head injury. With
trembling the hot exhalation of his breath between his slightly parted
lips.
He was unconscious, not dead.
Fumbling in frustration with the release mechanism on her safety
harness, Lindsey heard new sounds that she could not identify. A soft
slapping. Hungry licking. An eerie, liquid chuckling. For a moment
she froze, straining to identify the source of those unnerving noises.
Without warning the Honda tipped forward, admitting a cascade of icy
water through the broken windshield onto Lindsey’s lap. She gasped in
surprise as the arctic bath chilled her to the marrow, and red she was
not lightheaded after all. The car was moving. It was afloat. They
had landed in a lake or river. Probably a river. The placid surface of
a lake would not have been so active.
The shock of the cold water briefly paralyzed her and made her wince
with pain, but when she opened her eyes, she could see again. The
Honda’s headlights were, indeed, extinguished, but the dials and gauges
in the dashboard still glowed. She must have been suffering from
hysterical blindness rather than genuine physical damage.
She couldn’t see much, but there was not much to see at the bottom of
the night-raped ravine. Splinters of dimly glimmering glass rimmed the
broken-out windshield. Outside, the oily water was revealed only by a
sinuous, silvery phosphorescence that highlighted its purling surface
and imparted a dark obsidian sparkle to the jewels of ice that floated
in tangled necklaces atop it. The riverbanks would have been lost in
absolute blackness but for the ghostly raiments of snow that cloaked the
otherwise naked rocks, earth, and brush. The Honda appeared to be
motoring through the river: water poured halfway up its hood before
parting in a “V” and streaming away to either side as it might from the
prow of a ship, lapping at the sills of the side windows. They were
being swept downstream, where eventually the currents were certain to
turn more turbulent, bringing them to rapids or rocks or worse. At a
glance, Lindsey grasped the extremity of their situation, but she was
still so relieved by the remission of her blindness that she was
grateful for the sight of anything, even of trouble serious.
Shivering, she freed herself from the entangling straps of the safety
harness, and touched Hatch again. His face was ghastly in the queer
backsplash of the instrument lights: sunken eyes, waxen skin, color less
lips, blood oozing-but, thank God, not spurting from the gash on the
right side of his head. She shook him gently, then a little harder,
calling his name.
They wouldn’t be able to get out of the car easily, if at all, while it
was being borne down the river-specially as it now began to move faster.
But at least they had to be prepared to scramble out if it came up
against a rock or caught for a moment against one of the banks.
The opportunity to escape might be short-lived.
Hatch could not be awakened.
Without warning the car dipped sharply forward. Again icy water gushed
in through the shattered windshield, so cold that it had some of the
effect of an electrical shock, halting Lindsey’s heart for a beat or two
and locking the breath in her lungs.
The front of the car did not rise in the currents, as it had done
previously. It was settling deeper than before, so there was less river
under to provide hIt. The water continued to pour in, quickly rising
past Lindsey’s ankles to mid-calf. They were sinking.
“Hatch!” She was shouting now, shaking him hard, heedless of his
injuries.
The river gushed inside, rising to seat level, churning up foam that
refracted the amber light from the instrument panel and looked like
garlands of golden Christmas tinsel.
Lindsey pulled her feet out of the water, knelt on her seat, and