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He felt himself hit the ground chest-first, the shock driving the air out of his lungs, and then as he fell face-forward into the mud there was sharp metallic snap and a white-hot explosion of pain on both sides of his face. He could feel something like knives punching in through his jaw and cheeks and temples. Broken bits of teeth filled his mouth and he tried to spit them out so he could scream. But he could not scream. Not the way he wanted to, not the way he needed to. The teeth held his jaws shut, locked. Trapped.
Ross Cruickshank lay there in the dark with a heavy-grade steel bear trap locked around his face, the teeth buried deep, a chain anchoring it to the trunk of a tree.
It took nearly an hour for him to die from blood loss, shock, and burns.
It took less than a minute for him to come back.
But all through that night and for all the nights and days to follow, Ross lay facedown in the forest, caught in the jaws of the trap, chained to the tree, unable to rise, unable to hunt, unable to do anything about the awful, gnawing hunger.
All he could do was lay there and moan.
And rot.
EAST OF THE BORDENTOWN STARBUCKS
Deborah Varas drove like hell.
And hell itself seemed to follow.
Mushroom clouds of burning gas billowed into the air, and the trees along both sides of the road burned like candles.
Her husband, Roger, was a silent, twitching hulk in the seat next to her. She tried not to look at him, tried not to smell the cooked meat stink of him. He’d stood between her and the first blast of superheated air. She would remember how it looked as he seemed to rise into the air, arms out to his side as if crucified against the night. And then flew back against her and they both went tumbling and crashing into the watery mud beside the road.
It was the mud that saved them, of that Deborah had no doubt.
If they were, in fact, safe.
It had been a screaming hell to pull him out of the mud and to support him as they staggered toward their car. The doors were still open from when they’d gotten out to see what was wrong, and Deborah pushed him in. She didn’t dare pull the seat belt around him. Too much of him looked blistered.
Instead she limped around to the driver’s side, got in, slammed her door, cut the wheel, and tore off another car’s bumper as she broke out of the line of stopped cars. She hit the gas hard to give the car enough momentum to fly across the drainage ditch. Even then the rear wheels hit the lip and for a moment Deborah thought the car would slide backward into the water. But the muscular front wheels somehow found purchase in the mud and the car lurched forward onto the median. She cut across, weaving around staggering survivors who were all trying to flee the blast, and then she hit the opposite lane, fishtailed around, straightened, and bore down to the west. The speedometer climbed to sixty and then eighty, and after that she stopped looking.
Deborah had no idea what had happened. The stalled cars and then something that looked like a riot, but it was half a mile from where she and Roger stood. It looked, though, as if whatever the commotion was it was coming their way, but then the world seemed to explode. She wondered about that, and whether she should be far more upset than she was. Shock. It was shock.
I’m in shock.
It was a strange thought to have. Like realizing you’re drunk. You know it, but can’t really take control of body or mouth or anything. Like being a passenger in a hijacked car.
I’m in shock.
She knew it to be true, but she didn’t know what to do or how to even react to that truth.
As she drove, she tried to work saliva into her mouth to clear away the awful taste. When the heat wave hit them, she’d taken a mouthful of ash and hot dust. She wasn’t badly burned—no worse than eating soup that was too hot—but the ash had a terrible taste. Sour and nasty.
And it itched something terrible.
Then she scolded herself for worrying about that when her husband was in such agony. She had to get him to a doctor. To a hospital.
Deborah fished for her cell phone, but there was no signal. None.
She turned the radio on, but the only station she could find was a conspiracy theory talk show. She switched it off.
Tears ran down her face as she drove.
Three times she saw flashing red and blue police lights, but they were on some other road, parallel to where she was, and far away. Heading toward the blast. And she did not want to go back there for anything. Deborah didn’t know if it was some terrorist thing or something equally horrifying, but she wanted no part of it.
In the darkness beside her, Roger moaned and shifted. She touched him as gently as she could, and he didn’t hiss or jerk away. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as he looked, she thought, praying that she was right.
“Roger?” she asked. “Hold on, baby, we’re going to the hospital.”
