Ken McClure - The Lazarus Strain

The sleet had stopped by the time Steven left to drive over to Leila’s place but the temperature had dropped sharply in the last hour and the roads had started to ice up. The attendant at the filling station told him that the authorities had been warned earlier about the likelihood of this but had been reluctant to send out grit spreaders, fearing that the rain would wash it all away and road grit cost money. Steven’s MGF might be a joy to drive on smooth, dry tarmac but could turn into a nightmare in adverse weather conditions. The fact that it sat so low on the road meant that the screen constantly had to be cleared of muck flung up by other vehicles and its quick response to brake and accelerator meant constant sideways twitching on slippery surfaces.

Steven was ultra cautious on the narrow roads leading over to Holt but it was still heart-in-mouth time on a number of occasions when black ice made its presence felt and a disagreement regarding direction of travel arose between driver and car. As he approached a narrow bridge spanning a river gorge, Steven slowed right down when he saw the flashing yellow lights of, presumably, a road gritting vehicle coming towards him. He pulled in to the side, as close to the verge as he dared, half tucked in behind the bridge parapet on his side of the road.

He was just beginning to take comfort from the fact that at least the road ahead would be freshly gritted when he saw that the snow-clearing blade on the front of the gritter had been lowered as it came on to the bridge: this made the vehicle so wide that it filled the entire width of the road: there wouldn’t be enough room for it to pass without scraping the side of his car. Fearing that the driver hadn’t seen him sitting there, Steven moved a little further over on to the verge, sounding his horn and flashing his lights. But to no avail. The vehicle kept coming.

Just as he made a fear-fuelled decision to get out of the car, the inside wheels of the MG slipped down into the unseen ditch they had been precariously perched over. The car pitched 45 degrees to the left and Steven fell back inside, his shoulders ending up on the passenger seat and his knees curled under the steering wheel. He had just started to elbow his way up into a position where he could see out again when the steel blade of the grit lorry hit the front of the MG, smashing its off-side headlight and scraping along the metal until it pushed the car completely over onto its side. The impact threw Steven violently back into the car.

Once again he fought in the confined space of the two-seater to get upright. The only way out of the car was through the driver’s door window which was now an escape hatch edged with broken glass above his head. When he finally managed to clear enough and poke his head out through it, he could see that the gritter had stopped some twenty metres away.

‘Stupid bastard!’ Steven yelled. ‘Are you blind?’

The gritter started to reverse slowly and Steven could see the driver looking back through the rear window of his cab. He was well wrapped up against the cold and was wearing noise-protector ear muffs. Steven continued to mutter abuse as he tried to clear the remainder of the broken glass away from the window frame before attempting to climb out. ‘Just what the fuck were you thinking of… The council’s insurance company is really going to love you…’

The words froze on Steven’s lips when he suddenly realised that the gritter was not going to stop. Fear gripped him and he stammered, ‘What the f…?’ as the grit hopper grew ever nearer until finally, its snow blade crunched into the MG. The impact appeared not to register with the JCB; it continued pushing the car backwards like a child’s toy with Steven inside, still struggling to push himself out through the driver’s window space but being thrown off balance at every attempt. He felt a sudden jerk as the car was forced up on to the bridge parapet. He had no idea what lay in the darkness below but he knew that he was just about to find out.

Steven parted company with the car as it rolled over the parapet and spilled him out of the window gap he’d been so desperately trying to escape through. So many things flashed across his mind as he went into a tumbling free fall, not least thoughts of his daughter. I’m so sorry, Jenny, was the only cogent one he could muster before he felt tree branches whip his face and pummel his body as he crashed down through them until one almighty blow to his midriff halted his fall, knocking the wind out of him and making him regurgitate the contents of his stomach. He was dimly aware of stomach acid burning his throat before feeling himself slide slowly off the branch, despite his best efforts to grab on to something. He fell again through the black void until an explosion of light inside his head consigned him to oblivion.

When he awoke, Steven found that he could not stop his teeth chattering and the one limb that he did seem to have any feeling in — his right arm — was almost numb with cold. He tried to think logically but the pain inside his head kept distracting him from doing anything other than shiver and struggle for breath. Although his ability to feel pain was telling him that he was still alive, the fact that he couldn’t feel his legs and that a nuclear explosion seemed to have gone off inside his skull was stopping any celebration of this discovery. He tried moving his shoulders and found that he could, but he could only feel the right side of his body and then only above the waist. He felt about him with his right hand, trying to investigate his situation and discovered that most of his body was immersed in a shallow, slow moving river. The flow was sluggish because its surface was turning to ice. He was lying on his left side with his face resting on a slime covered boulder.

Despite the pain and apparent hopelessness of his situation, Steven knew that he hadn’t yet reached the final stages of hypothermia where he could expect the pain to lessen and the prospect of a long comfortable sleep to beckon with open arms as his metabolism slowed to a halt. Furthermore, the discovery that he was lying in an icy river suggested to him that his failure to detect any feeling in his lower limbs might be due to cold rather than spinal injury, which had been his first terrifying thought. He had to get out of the river.

He reached out behind his head with his right hand but immediately had to stop when he felt an agonising pain in his chest. He explored the area gingerly and discovered that he had at least two broken ribs and possibly a third. The last thing he needed right now was for a broken rib to puncture his lungs. He rolled his upper body as far as he could to the left and reached out again with his right arm, this time in the other direction. He found a sharp ridge in a boulder and hooked his fingers over it to start dragging himself towards the bank.

The dead weight of his numb, lower body meant that he could only manage a few inches at a time but at least he was moving. In the end, it took him more than ten minutes to get completely out of the water and start work on his unfeeling limbs, left arm first. By the time he had regained feeling in his arms and legs it seemed as if every muscle in his body had gone into involuntary spasm with the cold. He was shivering so much that he had difficulty breathing as he tried to check himself out for any injury that had been masked through numbness.

Amazingly, the damage he’d suffered seemed confined to the broken ribs which must have happened when the tree somewhere up on the side of the gorge had broken his fall. Apart from that he had multiple cuts and bruises, including a lump above his left temple — which could of course, be signalling a skull fracture, he cautioned himself — but nothing else seemed to be broken. His situation was however, desperate; and right now, cold was the thing that was going to kill him.