Set in Stone (1987) by Robert Goddard

Author:Robert Goddard
Format: epub
Published: 1987-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

When I heard the crash, I remember thinking, Please God, don’t let him die. I suppose the prayer was as much for me as for Matt. I’d engineered some kind of second chance for both of us and I’d thrown it away. Now I wanted a third chance more desperately than I’d ever wanted anything. But even second chances are rare. I was asking for the impossible. When I pulled in at the side of the road and ran ahead to where the collision had ended in a tangle of crushed metal and shattered glass, all I could see of Matt’s car was a distorted shape beneath the cab of the lorry. It scarcely looked like a car at all. Anyone inside had to be dead. It simply wasn’t survivable. I stopped for a moment and stared at the flattened lump of metal, from which glass smashed to powder was falling slowly and irregularly, like snow from the branches of an overladen tree. It wasn’t quite real, yet I knew it was true. This was where our friendship came to its close, bleeding out, cold and slow, into the lengthening night.

§

But chances, first, second or third, are always double-edged. They can go one way or the other, irrespective of what you want, or fear, or even deserve. They owe you no favours, but they bear you no grudges. They lie where they fall. Nine times out of ten, maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred, the crash would have been fatal. But that night was the one time, maybe the only time. That night, Matt didn’t die.

He was lucky. He was very lucky. The air-bag had inflated between him and the windscreen. And one of the two policemen in the patrol car was able to staunch the worst of his bleeding, while the other one summoned an ambulance and a fire crew with cutting equipment. All this while I was still standing and staring. Matt was trapped in his seat, unconscious but still breathing, with blood from minor cuts bathing his face, while the blood from some more serious wound was already dripping out of the car into the trails of petrol and water seeping from the fractured tank and radiator.

The lorry driver was unhurt, but disorientated by shock. He kept talking to me, in a stream of disbelieving reruns of what had happened, while I watched the policeman working on Matt. Then the other policeman was at me with questions. Did I know the victim and his next of kin? Had he been drinking? Had there been an argument? I tried to explain, but the look on his face suggested I wasn’t making a lot of sense. I probably sounded about as coherent to him as the lorry driver did to me, and for the same reason: shock had reduced me to a stumbling, slow-witted shadow of myself.

I stayed that way throughout the hour it took them to cut Matt free and load him into an ambulance. Paramedics, doctors and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.