Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,15

Mandy and Jenny. They were both layered in shadows, hanging upside down like bats. Mandy was sobbing into her hands. Jenny was either unconscious or dead.

In the distance came the unmistakable drone of an approaching vehicle. The hearse coming back for them?

Steve maneuvered his body in the awkward space so he could grasp the door handle. He tugged it. The door was stuck.

Tires screeched to a halt.

Steve drove his heels into the window. The glass spider webbed. He kicked it again, harder, and again, harder still, until his feet stamped through it. He rolled onto his hands and knees and scrambled through the shattered window. He heard branches snapping, vegetation crackling, and he was suddenly filled with an exquisite terror, sure the driver of the hearse was going to be something with a hole for a face and leathery wings and—

Austin shouted Jeff’s name; Noah, Steve’s.

“Here!” Steve managed, standing and swooning into the upturned car. Austin and Noah and Cherry burst through the thicket. They came to an abrupt standstill.

“Oh no,” Austin said, those two words barely audible but powerful enough to halt a marching band. “No, no, no…”

Steve pushed himself away from the car on splintered pegs for legs and faced the wreckage. In the frosty light he could see it clearly enough. Jeff’s head and shoulders protruded from the windshield like a half-eaten meal. He lay on his back. Given that the vehicle rested upside-down on top of him, his nose kissed the hood.

Noah brushed past Steve, dropped to his knees, and pried open the back door. He climbed in and spoke calmly to Mandy while attempting to extract her.

Steve wobbled around the front of the car—the BMW’s distinctive headlights and kidney-shaped grille were an unrecognizable mash of metal—and all but collapsed next to Jenny’s door. Blood smeared the window. He gripped the handle and pulled, expecting the door to be stuck. It swung open with ease. He felt one of Jenny’s dangling wrists for a pulse, but his hands were shaking too badly to perform this action correctly. He unbuckled her seatbelt, lowered her body into his arms, then dragged her out onto the leaf litter. The fog billowed around her, caressed her. He noticed her chest moving up and down and said a silent prayer of thanks.

Meanwhile, Austin had crawled into the gap beneath the hood and now he shouted, “Jeff’s alive! He’s breathing!”

While Noah and Austin discussed what to do next in urgent tones, Steve patted Jenny on the cheek, urging her to wake up. All the while his heart was filled with guilt. He had invited her on this trip. She had wanted to spend the weekend studying, but he’d insisted they needed a break from school, he’d wanted her to finally meet his friends, and now here she was, lying on the damp earth, bloody and broken.

Her eyes fluttered open.

“Jenny!” he said. “Thank God! Are you okay?”

“Okay…”

“You hit your head.”

“Hurts…”

“It’s just a little—”

The rest of the sentence died on his lips.

He could smell gasoline.

Gas? Jenny thought slowly. What was Steve talking about? Were people camping nearby?

“We have to move away from the car,” Steve was telling her now, though it remained difficult to hear him through the ringing in her ears. “I’m going to carry you.”

“I can…okay…”

Steve helped her to her feet. Pain flared in the left side of her head. She almost toppled over, but Steve caught her in his arms.

“Let me carry you,” he insisted.

“No, I…” She couldn’t find the right word. “Just…dizzy.”

Jenny allowed him to lead her away from the wreckage. Without warning her trembling legs gave out beneath her. She dropped to her knees. Steve was saying something to her, though the words seemed suddenly far away. Her vision blurred, darkened—and then she was floating above her body, which was lying on the operation table in the cadaver lab, nude and lifeless. Nine fellow students were gathered around the table, everyone wearing brown lab coats and dishwashing gloves to protect against formaldehyde. Nobody seemed shocked or saddened that Jenny was the cadaver today. Professor Booth was giving some sort of eulogy in Latin that she couldn’t understand. She wanted to tell them she wasn’t dead, but she couldn’t speak, only hover, insubstantial, like a ghost.

Belinda Collins stepped to the table. She was one of the gunners in the class, ambitious to a fault. Ever since Jenny scored higher than her on their first assignment, Belinda had done her best to make life miserable for Jenny, and Jenny knew she