The Lazarus Strain (24 page)

Steven was ultra cautious on the narrow roads leading over to Holt but it was still heart-in-mouth time on a number of occasions when black ice made its presence felt and a disagreement regarding direction of travel arose between driver and car. As he approached a narrow bridge spanning a river gorge, Steven slowed right down when he saw the flashing yellow lights of, presumably, a road gritting vehicle coming towards him. He pulled in to the side, as close to the verge as he dared, half tucked in behind the bridge parapet on his side of the road.

He was just beginning to take comfort from the fact that at least the road ahead would be freshly gritted when he saw that the snow-clearing blade on the front of the gritter had been lowered as it came on to the bridge: this made the vehicle so wide that it filled the entire width of the road: there wouldn’t be enough room for it to pass without scraping the side of his car. Fearing that the driver hadn’t seen him sitting there, Steven moved a little further over on to the verge, sounding his horn and flashing his lights. But to no avail. The vehicle kept coming.

Just as he made a fear-fuelled decision to get out of the car, the inside wheels of the MG slipped down into the unseen ditch they had been precariously perched over. The car pitched 45 degrees to the left and Steven fell back inside, his shoulders ending up on the passenger seat and his knees curled under the steering wheel. He had just started to elbow his way up into a position where he could see out again when the steel blade of the grit lorry hit the front of the MG, smashing its off-side headlight and scraping along the metal until it pushed the car completely over onto its side. The impact threw Steven violently back into the car.

Once again he fought in the confined space of the two-seater to get upright. The only way out of the car was through the driver’s door window which was now an escape hatch edged with broken glass above his head. When he finally managed to clear enough and poke his head out through it, he could see that the gritter had stopped some twenty metres away.

‘Stupid bastard!’ Steven yelled. ‘Are you blind?’

The gritter started to reverse slowly and Steven could see the driver looking back through the rear window of his cab. He was well wrapped up against the cold and was wearing noise-protector ear muffs. Steven continued to mutter abuse as he tried to clear the remainder of the broken glass away from the window frame before attempting to climb out. ‘Just what the fuck were you thinking of . . . The council’s insurance company is really going to love you . . .’

The words froze on Steven’s lips when he suddenly realised that the gritter was not going to stop. Fear gripped him and he stammered, ‘What the f . . .?’ as the grit hopper grew ever nearer until finally, its snow blade crunched into the MG. The impact appeared not to register with the JCB; it continued pushing the car backwards like a child’s toy with Steven inside, still struggling to push himself out through the driver’s window space but being thrown off balance at every attempt. He felt a sudden jerk as the car was forced up on to the bridge parapet. He had no idea what lay in the darkness below but he knew that he was just about to find out.

SIXTEEN

Steven parted company with the car as it rolled over the parapet and spilled him out of the window gap he’d been so desperately trying to escape through. So many things flashed across his mind as he went into a tumbling free fall, not least thoughts of his daughter. I’m so sorry, Jenny, was the only cogent one he could muster before he felt tree branches whip his face and pummel his body as he crashed down through them until one almighty blow to his midriff halted his fall, knocking the wind out of him and making him regurgitate the contents of his stomach. He was dimly aware of stomach acid burning his throat before feeling himself slide slowly off the branch, despite his best efforts to grab on to something. He fell again through the black void until an explosion of light inside his head consigned him to oblivion.

When he awoke, Steven found that he could not stop his teeth chattering and the one limb that he did seem to have any feeling in – his right arm - was almost numb with cold. He tried to think logically but the pain inside his head kept distracting him from doing anything other than shiver and struggle for breath. Although his ability to feel pain was telling him that he was still alive, the fact that he couldn’t feel his legs and that a nuclear explosion seemed to have gone off inside his skull was stopping any celebration of this discovery. He tried moving his shoulders and found that he could, but he could only feel the right side of his body and then only above the waist. He felt about him with his right hand, trying to investigate his situation and discovered that most of his body was immersed in a shallow, slow moving river. The flow was sluggish because its surface was turning to ice. He was lying on his left side with his face resting on a slime covered boulder.

Despite the pain and apparent hopelessness of his situation, Steven knew that he hadn’t yet reached the final stages of hypothermia where he could expect the pain to lessen and the prospect of a long comfortable sleep to beckon with open arms as his metabolism slowed to a halt. Furthermore, the discovery that he was lying in an icy river suggested to him that his failure to detect any feeling in his lower limbs might be due to cold rather than spinal injury, which had been his first terrifying thought. He had to get out of the river.

He reached out behind his head with his right hand but immediately had to stop when he felt an agonising pain in his chest. He explored the area gingerly and discovered that he had at least two broken ribs and possibly a third. The last thing he needed right now was for a broken rib to puncture his lungs. He rolled his upper body as far as he could to the left and reached out again with his right arm, this time in the other direction. He found a sharp ridge in a boulder and hooked his fingers over it to start dragging himself towards the bank.

The dead weight of his numb, lower body meant that he could only manage a few inches at a time but at least he was moving. In the end, it took him more than ten minutes to get completely out of the water and start work on his unfeeling limbs, left arm first. By the time he had regained feeling in his arms and legs it seemed as if every muscle in his body had gone into involuntary spasm with the cold. He was shivering so much that he had difficulty breathing as he tried to check himself out for any injury that had been masked through numbness.

Amazingly, the damage he’d suffered seemed confined to the broken ribs which must have happened when the tree somewhere up on the side of the gorge had broken his fall. Apart from that he had multiple cuts and bruises, including a lump above his left temple - which could of course, be signalling a skull fracture, he cautioned himself - but nothing else seemed to be broken. His situation was however, desperate; and right now, cold was the thing that was going to kill him.

Although he had been in very good physical condition, the fact that he had been wet through and outdoors in freezing temperatures for some hours was something he could not possibly sustain for much longer. However bad he felt and however great the danger of puncturing his lungs with broken ribs he simply had to start moving and keep moving until he found help or it found him.

He was attempting to stand up for the third time when the moon came out from behind the clouds and lit up the gorge with pale light. The sight did little to gladden his heart as the rock walls on both sides seemed almost vertical and, high above him, he could see the damaged parapet where the MG had come over. Along to his right he could see the wreckage of his car strewn across the river. He reckoned that his best chance – maybe his only one - might be someone seeing the damage to the bridge parapet and reporting it but it was on a minor road and he had no idea of the time or how long he’d been unconscious. It might well be the middle of the night.

His phone! His mobile phone! The thought prompted a frantic search through his pockets with wet hands that resisted entrance and exit to every one of them but then he remembered that it would have been in the hands-free holder in the car. Subsidiary thoughts about the chances of it still working being slim and the unlikelihood of there being a signal at the foot of this gorge were pushed to the back of his mind as he clung instead to the possibility that it had been flung free of the car and had landed in a patch of soft moss somewhere near his feet. A quick look removed this possibility from the equation.

Steven made his way along the narrow, stony river bank to the wreckage and started searching. Glancing up at the sky, he could see that the moonlight was not going to last much longer - a thick bank of cloud was approaching. Doing his best to protect his ribs with one arm folded across his chest, he peered into what was left of the cabin and saw that the phone mounting was still above water - but was empty. ‘Shit,’ he murmured as he felt around the submerged floor pan without finding anything. His search was constantly impeded by the bag of logs he’d bought at the filling station floating around in front of him. He yanked them out of the car angrily and threw them on to the bank before continuing but it seemed clear: the phone was not in the car.

Another quick glance up at the sky told him that he couldn’t have more than three or four minutes of moonlight left. Sheer frustration left him trying to curse everything at the top of his voice although the contractions in his throat and the violent shivering in his body made even that impossible in any satisfactory way.

He was into his third chorus of, ‘Bastard . . . bastard . . . bastard,’ accompanied by thumping his fist on the grassy bank when a glint caught his eye. There was something metallic lying on the bank about ten yards away . . . He crawled along the bank towards it and recognised his phone. He snatched it up and then realised that it was only the front of the phone. The back, comprising the battery, was missing.

Steven slumped down on the ground, feeling the will to live seriously weaken in him. His shivering was subsiding; the pain was fading and he was starting to feel comfortable. For the moment he would get some sleep and someone would come along in the morning . . .

‘Get up!’ warned the voice inside his head. ‘Get your arse into gear, Dunbar! Move it!’ It was the voice of a drill sergeant from all those years ago. The voice that had driven him on through the hell of an SAS selection course in the mountains of North Wales. ‘Giving up is not an option! You go to sleep now and you’ll never wake up again. Your choice!’

Steven got to his knees and found himself facing the bag of logs he’d flung on to the bank. The irony made him dissolve into maniacal laughter for a few moments. ‘Nice one, God,’ he spluttered but through the anger and pain and frustration and the desire to lie down and sleep his way out of it all, the image of a fire had been kindled. He started crawling up and down the bank as fast as he could in order to keep moving and he concentrated on the idea of a fire. He needed a fire . . . he wanted a fire . . . he had a bag of wet logs . . . the matches he’d bought would be useless too . . . but he hadn’t bought matches! There had been a box of disposable lighters beside the till in the service station. He’d bought one of these instead!

Once again he searched through his pockets and found the lighter. He flicked the wheel with his thumb and sparks flew into the air. He tried twice more and was rewarded with a flickering flame that seemed suddenly to symbolise for him all hope on Earth.

Steven resumed crawling up and down the bank as he felt his legs go numb again. Keep moving . . . keep moving . . . must keep moving. Disjointed thoughts vied with the pain in his knees from crawling over stones. What can I burn? . . . no paper . . . the firelighters were at the bottom of the river: he’d seen them lying there . . . the logs were soaking wet . . . it would take a furnace to light them, not a bloody cigarette lighter . . . a furnace . . . a furnace . . . if the car’s petrol tank hadn’t ruptured . . . he had the makings of a furnace!

Steven dragged himself back to the car and unscrewed the filler cap, feeling almost nauseous with relief when petrol vapour reached his nostrils: the tank was intact. It seemed sweeter than any perfume but he needed a way to ignite it and preferably not with his face over the tank at the time.

Using what he recognised might be the last remaining ounce of strength he had left in his body, he ripped the front of his shirt and tore a strip away to dangle it in the tank. Please God it would reach! He pulled the material back out and smelt the end. It was soaked in petrol.

He suspected that he was only going to have one chance at this. He was counting on the tank not exploding because the cap was off and the contents were not confined . . . but on the other hand it just might. He trailed the shirt material from the cap opening along the body work and prepared to flick the lighter under it. He would do this and then dive immediately for the bank.

Steven flicked the lighter wheel and dived for the bank, doing his best to protect his injured chest by landing on his arm and side. Nothing happened. He looked back and saw the rag dangling there. At that moment, the clouds reached the moon and blackness swallowed everything up. He wanted to scream out his frustration but he steeled himself to feel his way back to the wreckage and find the end of the rag. Once again he flicked the lighter wheel and this time there was a yellow flash as he leapt back to the bank. This was followed by a second, more powerful, eruption of flame from the car as the main tank erupted.

Steven crawled away from the wall of heat that engulfed him, feeling a mixture of euphoria and pain. When the flames had died back a bit he returned and started throwing the wet logs into the cabin space in order to keep the fire going. He had a fire; he had heat. He just might survive. He was careful not to get too close, knowing of the agonising pain that comes with heating up numb limbs too quickly but after ten minutes or so he started to feel comfortable. He felt even better after another ten minutes when, through the darkness up to his left, he saw a number of flashing lights. They were an encouraging shade of blue.