Black Ice

Amy’s mother had always told her to look out for black ice on the road when she drove, it was a killer, and she should always be careful to watch the road and catch it when it appeared. This need to constantly eyeball the surface before her gripped to her mind and never let go, deep into adulthood she would drive confidently all year and then, as soon as the cold set in, she refused to get behind the wheel of her car for any reason.

Her boyfriend, Mikey, didn’t mind having to drive her everywhere in these times, but he for sure knew that one day she would have to grow up and get over her little phobia so he could do his own things in the winter again. Winters up in Washington State were long most years, and often began with a flash of freezing weather and snow storms before plateauing at just being cold through December and January. They tended to end with a shocking climax in February or March as the weather seemed to get as bored with the cold as the people did and suddenly allowed the sun to break through. Those first warm days were treasured, not least by Amy who would always excitedly get her car from the garage and go on a road trip down to Palmer Lake a half hour from her house for a dip in the water as it changed from mostly frozen to genuinely pleasant.

It was the middle of the night when the headlights caught a patch of road that seemed to shimmer a little too much for her liking, she had just enough time to turn and tell him to break before the wheels tripped and spun out from side to side. The whole car was thrown wildly in a full skid until it finally stopped, lodging itself in a snow bank that had formed in what had been a three-foot-deep trench by the side of the road.

The first thing Mikey became aware of was that his neck hurt, Amy was more concerned by the fact that they had crashed on the corner of a crossroads, and something was hurtling towards them. Two headlights, bright and round like oversized fireflies that were only getting bigger and bigger as the coughing hum of a truck’s engine grew louder too. Amy knew that if that truck also hit ice, it would probably lose all steering and plough right into them. She didn’t want to die, but it was getting more and more likely as the light from the truck suddenly became all she could see.

In a moment of quick thinking, Amy unbuckled herself and used the odd angle the car was sat in to unbuckle her boyfriend and drag him down to her. She used their combined weight to open the door just enough against the surface of the road to fit their bodies through.

Just then, the distinct cry of breaks and squeeing of rubber, it was like the sound of a tortured pig crying as the truck encountered its own patch of black ice and took on a trajectory for the embanked car that lay defenceless before it.

First, she pushed Mikey out and he dragged himself free as he nursed the fresh ache in his neck, then she managed to get out from under the car’s weight and run over to drag him further away from the site of the inevitable crash.

There was maybe a full two seconds between the couple clearing the area and the eighteen wheeled goliath slamming into what could have been their metal coffin, and almost as soon as they came together the sparks flew, and fire took over. The cabin of the truck was engulfed first, then Mikey’s little blue sedan went up too. There was a hideous grinding of metal, churning of breaking mechanisms, and the smell of burning fuel began to overtake the area. Soon, the noise and the initial waft dissipated only to be replaced by something the couple wished they didn’t have to be present for. The driver of the truck was secured in by his seatbelt, and the flames had come in through the windshield as it shattered from an impact with a tree, he took the face of the flames and was screaming for help as he cooked alive inside.

Amy and Mikey could only watch on, powerless to the reality that they could do nothing for him without either risking their own lives or prolonging his suffering. The smell of charring fat and burning hair drifted from the open windshield, and lasted a lot longer than his screams did.

“We need to get help.” Mikey said, sitting on the trunk of a recently downed tree as he nursed his neck.

The bruise had begun to turn purple quite quickly, and the centre of it looked almost green, little red shoots came off it like the web of cracks around a shattered window. His eyes were bloodshot and his teether were clicking together both in terror and from the skin wrenching cold he now found himself in. He was lucky he had decided to keep his coat on, as had Amy, while driving; now he just had to hope that his phone would work.

“No signal.” He sighed.

He tried in vein to call 911, but nothing went through. He tried to activate his phone’s emergency alert feature, but pressing the button did a frustrating amount of nothing. He looked over to his girlfriend as she pulled her phone from her coat pocket, it was bent oddly around the middle and the back had come off to expose the battery and the wires that were meant to be contained within the fragile frame. The guts of the phone were spilling out, and the screen was just as wrecked as their only transport.

“Maybe there’s a lodge?” Amy shivered.

Mikey looked back at her, bewildered by what she had said.

“A lodge?” He furrowed his eyebrows.

“Yeah, a little hotel.” She continued, tucking her uncovered hands up into her armpits to maintain the warmth she still had. “Me and my dad used to come out to them on holidays when I was a kid.” Her words were shaky and punctuated by deep, rasping attempts to breath. “They have them all over the place… Hell, we might even find an old hunter’s cabin.”

Her eyes lit up with hope as she pictured the hunter’s cabin her and her father had stayed in on one particular getaway to the wilds of Washington. It was one room and had everything you needed for life out on the land tucked into a space no bigger than the average lounge. A wood fire, a kitchen, a double bed topped with one of those itchy blankets that moths saw as a buffet, even just the idea made her body and soul feel warm. She could hear the crackle of burning logs, but then snapped back to life and saw it was nothing so pleasant, the burning wreck had spread to the tree it had smashed into and now the tree was shooting up a burning finger up into the starless black night sky.

Mikey looked at the crash, then to the pebble path that Amy was eyeing up, then back again.

“Can’t be worse than staying here.” He shrugged, and suddenly hissed at the shooting pain that fired through his neck again like a bullet ripping through every inch of flesh and muscled as it passed into him. “I really need to get this looked at.” He sighed.

So, the two walked on into the oppressive darkness that laid beyond the treeline and dampened every step along the pebble path with uncertainty. Their footfalls were off and unsteady, terrified of stepping in something unpleasant or even painful as they made their way out to what lay beyond.

Mikey had managed to use his phone’s flashlight for around the first half a mile before it finally drained down and died in his hands; he wanted to cry, but doing anything more than breathing hurt him worse than he’d ever known. Amy had been frustrated by the death of the flashlight, but she learned quickly to appreciate those brief seconds when the moon broke through the thick roof of leaves above them.

As they marched deeper into the woods, Amy suddenly felt a sickening weightlessness as one foot went off the edge of the path, followed by the rest of her body which turned into a ragdoll that tumbled limply down the steep incline. She felt like she had fallen miles when she finally ended her journey, but it had only been about six feet and ended in a sudden flattening and a mass of woven branches and vines; every groping limb of this diabolical plant was littered with an uncountable number of pointed thorns. She let out a cry, a pained cry that bellowed from somewhere deep in her core and echoed out into the surroundings with a warble as it bounced from tree to tree. The pain was bad in that first second, but slowly it got worse as the realisation set in. Sure, the wooden barbed wire currently pressing into her and snicking open little cuts all over her was bad, but it had nothing on the pain that proceeded to explode up from her core as she looked down and saw the giant splinter of a felled sapling that had penetrated her at the very end of the fall.

She knew she wasn’t going to make it to the cabin now, every time she moved the dagger that protruded a foot above her it ripped slightly in a new direction and made her scream out with that same horror and pain. After a few minutes bleeding and freezing, she looked back up to the ledge where she had fallen from.

“Mikey.” She cried.

Nothing, even the wind seemed to stop singing through the thick walls of trees as she cried his name again and again. Then, noise came back again. The wind, she had assumed, but it was more of a droll hum that seemed to vibrate from the dirt below her.

An earthquake? Maybe a truck rolling nearby that came to see what happened? Whatever it was, she knew she had to make the most of it. She grasped the shaft with two weakened hands, and fought against the blood that made her hands slip and slide back down. On a few occasions, her hands slipped down far enough for her to punch her own stomach, but she was too far beyond pain to even really acknowledge it.

Just as she passed up to the tip of the spear, she awoke with a start so powerful it was though someone had attached her to the battery of the car she was in the passenger seat of.

Mikey said something.

Amy stammered; her brain unable to find words.

Mikey said something else, but the heartbeat in the petrified woman’s ears was deafening. Her eyes began to scan the road in front of them, she yanked against her belt and almost climbed onto the dashboard to look into the golden glow of the headlights as they danced over the road before them.

Finally, Mikey said something she could understand. “Woah, what’s up with you?” He asked, passing a hand over her chest and trying to push her back into her seat.

“I… I can’t…” She formed those, the first words she managed to form in spite of the horrific terror still permeating her mind. “Sorry, bad dream.” She took in, and then dramatically released, a single deep breath.

“Well, that’s all it was.” Mikey comforted her, the hand petting the back of her hair slowly. “It was all just a dream. Just a dream.” He repeated it a few times in hopes it would drive the message home.

They drove the next mile in silence, and then Mikey opened his mouth again as they passed a sign for a nearby town. As he spoke, he finally pulled his hand back and placed it back on the wheel.

“What happened?” He asked. “In your dream, I mean.” He clarified.

“Oh, nothing much.” She lied. “we just had an accident and I-”

Amy’s mother had always told her to look out for black ice on the road when she drove, it was a killer…