Turn Around When Possible, J. C. Laird [best large ereader TXT] 📗

had come. Robert hit the gas and the SUV shot forward.

Cindy grabbed the overhead hand grip and tensed. “Hey, cool it; this isn’t the Indy 500 and you’re no Parnelli Jones. Take it easy; let’s not pile up on the way down.”

In response, Robert sped up even more.

But Cindy ignored him and was even smiling now that the mystery and uncertainty had been dispensed with. She unsnapped her seatbelt. “I’m going to get a couple of granola bars and bottles of water from the back…”

It was Samantha’s turn to interject. “Turn around when possible. Turn around when possible. Then turn right on Knox Creek Road,” she intoned. They both grinned at her admonishment. ‘Turn around when possible’ was her standard line whenever a turn was missed or they went the wrong way. This was one time when they were going to ignore her.

Retracing their route downward, Robert was back to zigging and sagging around muddy potholes, ruts and the detritus Mother Nature had scattered along the roadway. What happened next was one of those imponderable events that that leave mathematicians scrambling to calculate the odds.

For tens of thousands of years, erosion had been working its slow magic on the mountainside. Rain, wind, and the cycles of freezing and thawing had been breaking down the rock formations over the millennia. On this date, a huge chunk of the mountain face finally succumbed to gravity, gave up its tenuous hold a hundred feet above and began its long fall to the ground below.

The boulder hit at the base of the cliff, broke into three pieces, only one of which careened through the trees and onto the roadway toward their vehicle. Robert saw it coming and instinctively jerked the steering wheel to the right. Too late to avoid it, the huge stone chunk struck the SUV in the left rear, knocking it into a sickening, windmill spin and off the roadway.

Disaster might still have been averted had they missed the large, erosion caused depressions along the side of the road with their patinas of recently melted snow. Robert spun the steering wheel to the left, then the right, in a panicked attempt to somehow regain control, but the steel-belted radials failed to find purchase on the slick, water-sheened clay. The Kia continued to slue towards the mountainous drop-off, knifing between the trees, failing to strike anything that might stop there spinning slide.

A detached part of his mind could hear Cindy screaming next to him. Another part was taking in the seemingly incomprehensible, whirling green scenery around him. Unconsciously, he had a two-handed, vise-like grip on the steering wheel, his right foot crushing the brake pedal with all the weight he could muster from his 210-pound frame.

He still had a straight-armed death grip on the wheel and the brakes locked when the Kia’s rear end slid out over the precipice. Maybe if Robert had hit the gas, the front wheel drive Kia might have pulled them forward to safety. As it was, he was frozen in shock and fear, no more responsive than the cliff face opposite them on the other side of the roadway, a roadway a million miles away from them…

For a second the vehicle seemed to balance like a teeter-totter. Framed by their windshield, the trees and mountainside before them slowly began to disappear downward, replaced by the growing, azure blue sky as the Kia tilted farther and farther back, until the cloudless blue was all that could be seen. The SUV finally gave up the fight and began its plunge downward; the screeching of the metal undercarriage scraping against rock, joining the screams of the car’s occupants.

The car went down the mountainside like the metal ball in an old pinball machine, ricocheting down the treed and rock-strewn mountainside. Rolling, careening and flipping end over end, the seemingly endless sounds of metallic crashes, grinding metal and breaking glass joined Robert’s own roaring screams in a deafening cacophony.

The seat belts had almost immediately locked, painfully cutting into his stomach, chest and shoulder. The next to go were the side airbags as they rolled into the first tree, then the front airbags as they dove into and over an outcropping, the airbag delivering a solid punch to his upper body and head. Suitcases and other loose items in the car became projectiles, assaulting him into semi-consciousness, his head whipped back and forth from the violent gyrations. Then the car was airborne yet again, seemingly forever, as it soared and rolled awkwardly through the air in slow motion—a giant, metal coffin—before succumbing to gravity and crashing grill first into a slab of rock with a thunderous roar of buckling metal.

The Kia had all the latest safety features, including a reinforced passenger compartment, a metal ‘cage’ meant to protect the occupants even if the rest of the car was reduced to scrap metal in an accident. It was also equipped with a ‘drop out’ engine. Should the vehicle become involved in a violent front end collision—pushing the engine back towards the passenger compartment—the engine was designed to drop downward as it was pushed back, preventing it from entering the ‘cage’. But their forward velocity was so great and the impact so overwhelming, the safety system was compromised, the engine block partially pushing its way through the front firewall where Robert’s legs were still rigidly braced. His guttural screams of fear and pain turned to shrill shrieks of agony.

With a final groan of twisting metal, the car came to a rest in an upright position, braced against a large slab of rock, partially in the shade of a stunted pine nearby. The once stylish SUV crossover now resembled a crumpled piece of aluminum foil, cast onto the wooded and rocky mountainside by an indifferent giant’s hand. As the cloud of dust slowly settled, the silence was broken only by the faint, ticking sound of heated metal cooling, the cawing of crows returning in curiosity and the wind faintly sighing down the mountainside.

#

The pain in his legs was dull and throbbing, the smell of dust and antifreeze strong. The taste of blood was on his lips. A cool breeze wafted through the driver’s side window, chilling the perspiration on his face and the blood in his hair. A weight was pressing against him; he could hear low crying as Cindy pulled away the large suitcase wedged against him.

“Robert, are you okay?” She sobbed.

He squinted in the bright afternoon sunlight streaming through the opening where the windshield once had been, refocused, then looked at his wife next to him with a sharp intake of breath. The blonde hair on the left side of her head was dark red, matted with blood. The blood had coursed down her left cheek, joining swollen and bloody lips, her pretty face turned into some crimson caricature.

“My God, Cindy…?” he wheezed.

His wife had a dazed and bewildered look. “Robert, I told you to slow down!” Then, she felt her head and looked at the blood on her hand. “You know scalp wounds bleed a lot and I think I might have a few loose teeth,” she said, gingerly licking her lips. “But I think I’m okay.” Her look of bewilderment seemed to grow as she looked frantically from him to her surroundings. “Oh, my God, what…how is this…?”

Robert didn’t know if the tears in her eyes were from pain, anger or anguish. He wondered if she was going into shock.

He inventoried the space around them with some confusion and apprehension. Their passenger compartment had shrunk, the sides pushed in and the roof crushed lower. The glass in all the windows was gone. Now he could detect another odor. “I smell gas, let’s get out of here!” He tried to move his legs and let out a shriek of pain, gasping. “I can’t move my legs!”

“Stop, wait, don’t move, let me look!” Cindy managed to get the glove compartment open and retrieved a small, two-cell flashlight. Scooting back against the buckled passenger door as best she could, she lay on her stomach and tried to get a look under the collapsed dash board, which was now much closer to the floor of the vehicle. Robert’s legs disappeared beneath it, just above the knees.

Robert stared through the glassless windshield at the Kia’s hood. It resembled an accordion in its closed position, the hood only a third of its original length. He was lucky the engine block wasn’t sitting in his lap. He felt nauseated and light headed. A chill ran through him as Cindy continued to scrabble beneath the crushed dashboard with the flashlight. If he didn’t move, he could hardly feel his legs. Maybe if he just closed his eyes this would all go away…

Suddenly, Cindy was back up, frantically undoing the belt on her yellow sundress, her fair complexion now several shades paler, her blue eyes wide. Her hand was covered in more blood.

That got his attention. “What is it? What’s wrong?” he said.

“Bobby, your right leg is the worst, it’s bleeding pretty good. Don’t try and move your legs anymore.” She quickly, but gently, slid the belt under, then around his thigh above his knee. With a grunt and a grimace she yanked the belt tight, right up to the second-to-last notch and secured it. She looked at his ashen face, felt his clammy skin and peered into his dilated pupils. “It’s a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. You’re trying to go into shock, but I’m not going to let that happen. You will stay awake, you ornery son-of-a-bitch, or else I will kick your sorry ass the rest of the way down the mountain!” Her voice had the sharp edge of hysteria in it.

The bucket seatback on her side was broken and leaning back almost flat. Cindy quickly clambered over it and began rummaging in the scattered items in the rear seat, then in the storage area behind that. She returned with one of her t-shirts and two bottles of water. She soaked the shirt from one bottle and began swabbing it over his face, finally draping it around the back of his neck. The other bottle she opened and made him drink.

His eyes finally began to clear. “How bad is it?” he asked. Cindy was a nurse’s aide when they first met and married. She had continued working through her pregnancy with Elizabeth and for another three years after. But when David was born she’d decided enough was enough and opted to hang it up and become a full-time mother.

“I think the tourniquet will stop the bleeding, but we’ll have to loosen it every fifteen minutes or so to restore a little circulation and try to prevent infection from…”

“You mean gangrene?” he said.

The threat of hysteria had passed. She smiled grimly, “Well, Bobby, I sure can’t slip anything by you, can I? What about the rest of your sorry ass, anything broken or bleeding?”

Robert had taken inventory of himself as best he could and didn’t think anything else was busted up and told her so.

“What about you?” he said.

“Whiplash, I guess, a humongous headache and a killer backache,” she replied. “Oh, yeah, and it feels like Rocky Balboa punched me in the mouth.”

It was Samantha’s turn. “Turn around when possible. Turn around when possible,” she repeated in her innocuous, computer accent. He picked up the GPS and looked at it; the power cord had become disconnected from the dash but its battery had taken over. The arrow was in the middle of a blank, green screen, no roads indicated anywhere.

He looked back at Cindy and managed a weak smile. “Well, we’d better call someone and tell them we decided to take a short cut and drove off a cliff.”

“We’ll have to use your phone; mine disappeared out the back with my purse and most of our stuff.” She nodded towards the back of the car.

Robert managed to crane his head around without too much pain. The rear hatch had popped open on the way down and was half torn