Muriel Gray - Furnace

That expertly judged speed and angle let the outer tyre snag the frame and flip it on its side under the rig, giving all eight wheels the opportunity to travel directly over the stroller and its contents.

It was almost as if Josh’s hysterical intake of breath was the force which pulled his right leg up and slammed his foot down on the brake. But there was little point in the action. His chair had already bounced in response to that small shuddering bump, the slight motion the truck’s suspension registered as it negotiated a minor obstacle, the same motion that would indicate Jezebel had run over a pothole or a piece of lumber on the highway. Only this time it wasn’t a piece of lumber. It was eight pounds of brand-new flesh, bones and blood, strapped into its flimsy shell of plastic, aluminium and canvas.

The force of the braking threw Josh forward into the steering wheel, and after he whiplashed back with a winded grunt he snapped his head round, eyes and mouth as wide open as the muscles were designed to allow, wildly scanning the view from his open window as he panted for breath. In those few seconds that felt like minutes, he noticed three things. The first was that the woman in the pink suit was gone. The second was that the reflection in the store window showed him quite clearly that there was a small mangled mass beneath the trailer, caught untidily between the back wheels of the cab. The third was that the mother was emerging slowly, as if in a dream, from the door of the store, her mouth making a dark down-turned shape that was impossibly ugly. It took a few more seconds before her screams started. First her arms twitched at her sides and her body appeared to quiver with some internal electric current, and then it was as if that current had been suddenly cut. She collapsed to her knees like a prisoner about to be executed, and her dark open mouth shaped the cry that savaged the morning air with the naked brutality of its pain.

Behind her, in the open doorway, her toddler stood howling until adult arms swept it inside.

Josh was out of his cab and scrambling desperately beneath the trailer before he had time to consider what he might find there. Had he stopped to think he would never have approached that soup of flesh, but his body was working to some private agenda that had little to do with logic or thought. It moved and acted on instinct, as if unthinking swiftness of action could somehow undo what had most certainly and irreversibly been done.

The towelling one-piece babysuit had held most of its contents together, but it had expanded when the body inside changed shape, so that now it was not so much a garment as a large, sticky, flat sack. The blood seemed so thick and black, but the worst of it was the way the main aluminium support of the stroller had embedded itself in the middle of the baby’s skull, splitting the head in two in a diagonal line from one eyebrow to a tiny shoulder. It had forced both eyes from their sockets before they, too, were mashed into the glistening corpse.

Perhaps he thought the child would be unrecognizable. He was disappointed. The mess was still so obviously a baby that Josh put out a trembling hand and fingered one tiny foot that had somehow remained intact, regretting it instantly when his gentle touch made it shift slightly with a sickening slick sound. For a crazy moment, lying on his stomach beneath the trailer, he thought about those cartoons where the victim is run over by a road roller and peeled off the road in a long flat strip, and he wanted to laugh.

He wanted to shake with laughter, wanted to feel tears of mirth pour down his cheeks, and hold his sides as they ached with the effort of hilarity. But the sound he was already making, accompanying the stream of salty tears dripping from his chin, was a thin, reedy wail that came from the back of his throat. It was a sound very far away from laughter.

He lay there for a long time, then there were hands on his legs, pulling him out from under the truck. Gentle hands, squeezing him reassuringly as they tugged him back. And voices. Calm voices that sounded miles away, saying things like ‘come on now, fella’, ‘leave it now’, ‘come on there’.

Josh went limp. He was pulled free of Jezebel by three pairs of hands and manhandled into a sitting position. A man wearing thick spectacles and a blue cotton coat with ‘Campbell’s Food Mart’ stitched on the pocket, was kneeling in front of him, looking concerned.

Behind him were two lanky teenagers, one with the same coat and one in a T-shirt and low-slung jeans. The man was talking softly, as if to a wounded animal.

‘S’okay. S’okay now. Weren’t nothin’ you could’ve done there, fella. Sheriff’s on his way. You just sit tight.’

Josh looked at him dumbly and then turned to the sidewalk in front of the store where he had seen the mother collapse. She was sitting as he was, although being attended to by more people, but her head was thrown back and one arm reached up above her head as though trying to grab a rope. The woman, the woman in pink, that staring, crazy murderer, was nowhere to be seen. Josh realized with an accelerating panic she was not being pursued, that her absence was not an issue here. She had to be found, had to be stopped. He struggled to get to his feet.

‘It wasn’t no accident … listen … we have to find that woman … she …’

The bespectacled shopkeeper held him down.

‘Hey, hey. Come on there. You had a mighty bad shake-up. Hang on in there.’

A station-wagon ambulance was drawing up, and suddenly the hands that were pressing his shoulders down now went to his armpits and helped him to his feet.

He went meekly and sat down heavily on the edge of the sidewalk where his assistants abandoned him in favour of a split interest between the hysterical mother and the two paramedics crouching under the trailer. To Josh, the people making up this macabre tableau were moving slowly and dreamily as though they were under water. He blinked as a fat, dusty police car rolled to a halt behind the truck and watched impassively as a sheriff’s deputy climbed into Jezebel and moved her to the side of the street with a shudder of badly-changed gears.

He said nothing as a square man who claimed to be the sheriff led him to the police car and gently guided him into the back seat. But as they drove off, his armour of numbness was shattered by the sight of the bereaved mother, still sitting on the sidewalk, now embraced clumsily around her thin shoulders by a rough-hewn man in paramedic’s coveralls. She lifted her head as he sat in the police car, raised a trembling hand towards him and opened her mouth to speak. He waited, steeling himself for the abuse, the unimaginable but inevitable verbal wounding.

With the window shut he couldn’t hear her words, but her face was so close, and she spoke so slowly he could lip-read as clearly as if she had shouted.

Josh’s heart lurched as he watched her mouth say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then she bowed her head and gave in to her weeping once more.

‘No. I don’t understand.’

Dr McCardie tapped his pen on the desk and looked at her without sympathy.

‘It’s like I said, Miss Murray.’

‘Elizabeth.’

‘Elizabeth.’ He nodded politely but coolly, taking her point before continuing. ‘I realize that a scan may be the last thing you want when you obviously have your mind set on the termination, but in order to carry that termination out without complication, we need to know how the land lies.’

‘Why today? Why couldn’t you do this on Wednesday when I’m anaesthetized?’

The young man looked at her with an eyebrow raised and barely suppressed a sigh. ‘A scan is neither painful nor traumatic. What’s worrying me here is that you seem to believe that we’re just going to put everything right while you’re asleep. The termination is done under a local anaesthetic. You’ll be awake. But more important than your comfort, Elizabeth, you’re making a decision here. You’ll have to live with that decision when you get up and walk away. Do you understand what that means?’