The Crash

Chapter 11

11

This man is terrifying.

As he gets closer to my car, his features come into focus. He’s well over six feet tall, and even with a coat hiding his body, I can tell that he’s strong. He’s got a black hat stuffed over his head, and most of his face is concealed by a thick beard. If you saw someone who looks like him hitching a ride on the side of the road, you would never, ever pick him up. He’s the “murder you and dump your body in a swamp” type.

And he’s coming right toward me.

He raps on my window with his knuckles, his dark eyes peering into my car. My heart is thumping so loud, I feel like I’m going to pass out. Tuna is kicking me hard in the ribs.

Mama, be careful! I don’t trust that man!

I squint out the window, and the man holds up the object in his right hand to show me. I realize now it’s a shovel. Without further explanation, he starts shoveling the snow that’s apparently blocking my door from being able to open.

In the past, when I had to shovel my car out after a big storm, it would always take me forever. But this guy clears away the side of my car in less than a minute. He puts down the shovel and taps on the window again. It takes me a second to realize what he wants me to do.

He wants me to unlock the door.

Be careful, Mama!

I don’t want to unlock the door. I’m completely helpless right now, and although I need to be saved, I don’t want to be saved by this man. But at the same time, what am I supposed to do? Stay in the car and freeze to death?

So I hit the button to unlock the door.

The man pulls the car door open. As soon as the door swings open, the temperature inside the vehicle drops at least twenty degrees with the windchill factor. Snowflakes drop onto my face and hair.

“You okay?” the man asks me. His voice is deep, close to a growl.

I swallow. “No. I can’t get out. And…” I take a deep breath, knowing this next admission will reveal how helpless I am. “I think my ankle might be broken.”

The man’s eyes sweep over the inside of the car, assessing the situation. When his gaze falls on my belly jutting out of my open coat, his eyes widen slightly, but he doesn’t comment. He reaches down and presses a button that slides the seat backward. The pressure on my legs eases up.

Now that I’m free, I try again to move my left leg to get out of the car. Just like before, the pain is overwhelming. My eyes start watering. “I can’t move my leg.”

The man seems to be frowning, although it’s hard to read his facial expressions with that huge beard covering his face. “I’ll carry you back to my truck,” he says gruffly.

I want to protest, but there’s no other option. I can’t walk. I can barely move. If he doesn’t carry me, I’m not leaving this place.

“What’s your name?” he asks me.

I consider giving a false name, but what’s the point? He doesn’t need my name in order to hurt me if he gets it in his head to do so. “Tegan.”

“Hank,” he grunts, although he says it as if slightly annoyed by the human tradition of assigning names to people and animals.

Considering the fact that a blizzard is raging around us, Hank is eerily calm. When he slides one of his beefy arms under my legs, I nearly scream with pain. So he stops. He waits for the wave of pain to subside before he attempts to lift me again. He finally raises an eyebrow at me, and I nod to give him permission to keep going.

The good thing about being rescued by a man who is so terrifyingly large is that he has no problem lifting me along with the five gallons of fluid my body is retaining as well as Little Tuna. He doesn’t even grunt. I feel 100 percent secure in his arms, like there’s no way he could possibly drop me. He carries me through a snowdrift that looks several feet high, and he wrenches open the passenger door of his truck.

“Could I lie down in the back?” I ask.

“No,” he says without further explanation.

He helps me get into the passenger seat, and as awful as the pain in my ankle is, the worst part is knowing that I am going to have to do this again in reverse when I get to the hospital. But I can’t think about that. I’m not going to die buried in my car in a blizzard—I can handle some pain.

“Can you grab my purse?” I ask Hank. “It’s in the front seat of my car.”

He glances back at my car, which looks an avalanche fell on it. No wonder he brought a shovel to get me out. “Yeah, okay.”

“And my duffel bag?” I add.

He has every right to tell me to go to hell, that he’s not trudging back to my car to get all my crap, but he just nods.

The car is blissfully warm, and some of the sensation returns to my fingertips. My toes start to tingle and then burn, although the sensation is largely overwhelmed by the throbbing in my left ankle. I watch as Hank carries my luggage and my purse back to his truck, and he dumps them in the back seat before climbing into the driver’s seat next to me.

Inside the car, Hank pulls off his waterproof gloves and tugs off his hat, which is wet with snow. The hair on his head is clipped short and not nearly as unruly as his beard. And he’s slightly younger than I thought too—maybe late thirties. He has no expression whatsoever on his face, which makes me very uneasy.

“You buckled?” he asks me.

“Uh-huh.”

Without further comment, he gets the car moving. He navigates slowly and carefully through the mounting snow. I wonder how far we are from the hospital. Now that the cold isn’t distracting me anymore, the pain in my legs is escalating.

“Which hospital are you taking me to?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer me. And now I realize that the trees surrounding us are growing thicker by the second. It doesn’t seem like we’re going back to the main road. It seems like we’re going deeper into the woods.

“Which hospital are you taking me to?” I ask again, more insistently this time. I try not to let a note of alarm leak into my voice.

“I’m taking you to my house.”

My stomach drops. “Excuse me?”

“It’s just up the road. We’ll be there soon.”

“But…” I squint through the windshield at the increasingly dark and desolate stretch of road that we’re driving through—barely even a road anymore. “I’m injured. And…and I’m pregnant. I need to go to the hospital.”

He doesn’t answer this time. He just keeps driving deeper and deeper into the woods, to a place where nobody will ever find me.

Panic mounts in my chest. I should never have unlocked the door for this man. He’s taking me up to his deserted cabin in the middle of nowhere, and the surrounding area is now buried under two feet of snow. And with my injured ankle and giant belly, escape will be near impossible. I’ll be his prisoner as long as he wants me to be. I thought what Simon did to me was bad, but what is about to happen will be far worse.

This man is going to kill me.

But not before he does whatever he wants to me.