White Space

Above the roar in his ears came a high shriek of metal—and then, for just an instant, the world seemed to skip: a gasp in time and space, as if the storm had taken a deep breath and held it.

Someone started to scream.

Eric pushed up on trembling arms. His head was swimmy with pain. Panting, he hung on hands and knees like a dog, his brain swirling, coppery blood drizzling from his mouth. Then he dragged his head around, and his breath died somewhere deep.

Oh my God.

2

THE VAN HAD jumped the barrier. It should’ve kept going, tumbling over the lip of the road to crash into the valley below. Instead, the van hung on a ruin of crumpled metal, like the badly balanced plank of a kid’s teeter-totter. The van’s lights were still on, and the engine was running, but just barely, coughing and knocking in hard death rattles bad enough to make the chassis shudder. The air smelled of acrid smoke and hot oil.

In the van, someone was screaming in a long, continuous lash of sound. Eric saw the van bounce and begin to rock up and down, up and—

No, no! “Stop moving, don’t move, don’t move!” Ripping off his helmet, Eric swarmed to his feet and began to run, bawling over his shoulder, “Casey! Get your headlight on the van!”

As light flooded over the vehicle, the driver—the girl he’d seen spin by—leapt into being, framed in a rectangle of iced glass, frozen in an instant out of time. In the glare of the headlight, her hair was dark, and her skin, a cold bone-white. For a bizarre moment, Eric thought she looked dead already.

“Listen!” he bellowed over the wind. “The van’s jumped the barrier. The front end’s left the road. Do you understand?” When she nodded, he said, “Okay, unlock the doors, but don’t do anything else. Don’t move!”

There came the thunk of locks being disengaged, and then all the windows buzzed down, and he thought, okay, that was pretty smart. Lowering the windows would allow the wind to flow through the van instead of push against it. She’d already popped her shoulder harness, too, but wasn’t moving otherwise. Very smart.

“Hi.” Her voice was shaky, but she wasn’t going to pieces on him either. Smart, cool in a crisis—and she seemed familiar somehow. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. What’s your name?” His drill sergeant said if you called the wounded by name, they wouldn’t die. Probably Marine voodoo, but it couldn’t hurt.

“Emma.”

“I’m Eric.” He saw something flit through her face—surprise?—but then he was arming snow from his face and eyeing the back door on her side. The handle was within reach and tempting, but his angle was off, and he was afraid of unbalancing the van. “Who else is in there?”

“Just Lily.” Emma opened her mouth to say something else, but then a sudden shock of wind grabbed the Dodge, and her eyes went wide.

“Easy.” His heart was jammed into the back of his throat. “It’ll be okay. Take it easy.”

“I’m … I’m trying,” she said in a breathless wheeze. The van creaked, and then it began to rock: up, then down, then up.

“Eric,” Casey said from somewhere behind. His voice rose: “Eric, Eric, the van; the van’s going to …”

There came a scream, short and sharp as a stiletto, and then the other girl was turning around, trying to scramble over the front seat: “What are you waiting for? Get us out, get us out, get us out!”

“Lily!” Emma shouted, and Eric could see from that tight grimace that it took all her self-control not to look around. “Don’t move, Lily, don’t—” There was a loud squall, and Lily screamed again as the van dipped and slipped another inch and then two.

Eric didn’t even think about it. His right hand pistoned out to wrap around the handle on the driver’s side back door. As the van tipped in a drunken sway, Eric backpedaled, but the vehicle outweighed him by nearly two tons, and his heels only scoured troughs from the snow.

“Eric!” Casey shouted. “Eric, let go, let go!”

The van lurched. There came a long grind of metal, a high screech as something tore, and then Eric was choking against the stink of gasoline blooming from the ruptured fuel line. The van’s headlights swung down, the arc lengthening with a rending, gnashing clash of metal against metal.

Inside, Lily was shrieking: “Do something do something do something!”

All of a sudden, the back tipped, and Eric’s feet left the ground. No, no, no! For one dizzying, horrifying instant, Eric saw himself hurtling over the barrier, his arms and legs pin-wheeling through the dark all the way down. Then Eric’s knees banged into the ruined guardrail; a jagged edge ripped through his jeans to slice meat, and he grunted with sudden pain.

“Emma, come on!” Stretching his left hand, Eric leaned so far forward that there was nothing but air beneath his chest, and still he couldn’t bridge the gap. Emma’s hand was maybe four inches away, but those inches might as well have been miles. “Give me your hand, Emma,” he pleaded, desperately. “Give me your hand!”