Joe was yelling, and yanking on the wheel, and the car was slewing sideways. But in that split second she got the impression of someone tall and ragged and oddly lopsided; someone standing directly in the path of the car, head tilted to one side as if it was too heavy for the spindly neck that was supporting it. She saw no other details. The figure was nothing but a charcoal-grey silhouette on a pearly-grey background.
And then the car hit the figure side-on with a sickeningly loud bang, and the figure flew backwards, as though snatched away by some vast predator. Suddenly the car was spinning madly, and the tyres were screeching, and Jackie was being thrown about as if she weighed nothing.
Even as pain exploded in her shoulder and knee as she whacked them on the seat and door, a sharp, almost searing memory came to her of being seven years old and clinging to the safety bar of the waltzer in the fairground and wishing it would stop. And then, hot on the heels of that, she thought with an almost lucid calmness: This is going to be the biggest impact I've ever known. I wonder if I'll die.
Then suddenly there was silence, and she was lying at a strange angle across her seat, pressed back by the air bag. There was a smell in the air, fumes and hot metal, and she could taste blood in her mouth, and when she tried to move her leg a hot, jagged corkscrew of pain leaped from her shinbone to her hip, making her cry out.
Joe spoke. She couldn't see him, but she heard his voice, cracked and shaky. 'Jacks, are you OK?'
She opened her mouth to answer and it was full of blood. She spat it out.
'Hurt my leg,' she said.
She heard Joe shift beside her, then grunt softly in pain. 'I need to call for help,' he said, 'but I can't get a signal. I think it's this bloody fog.'
There was a screech of metal. Jackie couldn't think what it was at first, and then realised it must be the sound of the buckled driver's door being pushed open.
'What are you doing?' she said, fighting down panic.
'I need to get help,' he said again. 'I'm going to walk back along the road a bit, see if I can get a signal.'
'Don't leave me, Joe,' Jackie said.
'It'll only be for a few minutes. I need to call for an ambulance. And I need to find out what happened to that bloke we hit.'
'Don't leave me,' she said again.
'I'm not going to leave you,' he said. 'I'll be back in a few minutes, Jacks. Promise. Just. . . just try and relax, all right?'
She heard a creak of metal as he shifted his weight. A hiss of pain. Then the sound of his footsteps as he hobbled away, into the fog. His footsteps grew fainter, and then suddenly she couldn't hear them any more. She felt a sudden surge of loneliness, which threatened to escalate into outright panic. She breathed deeply, in and out, fighting to bring it under control. She told herself that everything would be fine, that Joe would get help, and that soon they would be in the hospital or at home, a bit bruised and battered, maybe, but wrapped up snug and warm in front of the telly, sipping nice hot cups of tea.
Because of the air bag she couldn't see much. Just a portion of the shattered passenger window and the swirling grey fog beyond. Curls of vapour were drifting in through the window, acrid and cold.
She was just beginning to wonder how much longer Joe was going to be when a terrible, ratcheting scream came tearing out of the fog.
It was an awful sound, barely human, and yet Jackie knew that it had come from her husband's throat. Gripped by freezing terror, she started to shake and cry. She tried to move, and her spine erupted with white-hot pain, so intense that she almost blacked out.
Then another scream tore into the echoes of the last, a high bubbling wail of pure agony. Now Jackie felt alternately hot and cold as sheer sickening panic surged through her. Terrified and helpless, she told herself that this couldn't be happening, it couldn't, it couldn't. . .
She tried to call her husband's name, to scream for help, but she couldn't make a sound.
Not even when she heard the slow, dragging footsteps coming towards the car.
Not even when a