Today I am continuing on from lst week's Tuesday's Tale using the prompt Light
“Are you hurt?” The
voice came from somewhere far away, and Jim struggled to focus on the source. A
figure in front of him swam into view.
“Not physically,”
he uttered in a voice devoid of emotion. Some part of his brain registered he’d
gone from hope to shock to fury and now blessed numbness, and heard it in his
voice.
“Shock.” The voice
confirmed his own assessment and hands on his shoulders encouraged him to
move. He didn’t want to leave them. Couldn’t.
He couldn’t leave his girlfriend and brother to the fate of strangers.
Whatever his own
feelings he found he couldn’t desert them even when they were beyond knowing or
caring.
He fought the hands
offering comfort. Pushed them away and
turned back to the wreck. When more
hands tried to drag him away he started screaming. “I know them. I know them.
I can’t leave them.”
The dragging and
pulling stopped. The hands still gripped his arms, but nno longer tried to urge
him away from the scene. Someone called
out and the officer, the one who’d arrived first, Jim noted ran up to where he
and the men now supporting him stood.
“What’s the
problem?” the officer asked.
“He says he knows
them.” The man on his right spoke, his
voice rough, almost accusatory to Jim’s ears.
“You never said
anything when I arrived.” The officer turned his full attention on Jim.
“I didn’t want to
believe it.” The truth slipped between his teeth before Jim could edit it. The box in his pocket twisted in his
fingers. Over and over it tumbled. He wanted to drag it out and hurl it, but his
fingers refused to let go, or so it seemed.
With the officer
and the two men still supporting him, Jim moved to the kerbside.
“Can you identify
the occupants of the car?”
“Jenny… Jennifer
Litchfield, my girlfriend, and my brother Luke Stanway.”
A beat of silence
followed Jim’s revelation before the officer spoke again. “Did you know who had
passed you before the accident?”
Jim nodded, because
he had. Hadn’t wanted to admit it to
himself when he saw them fly by; heard their laughter wafting back to him of
the warm air. Hadn’t wanted to admit,
hadn’t had time to admit, he had the answer to the question that had been
puzzling for so many weeks.
“Do you know where
they were going?”
Jim shook his
head. Truth could only go so far, and in
truth he didn’t know their destination.
He could guess, but that wasn’t knowing.
“Did you know…” The
officer’s voice disappeared beneath embarrassment.
“No.”
“Was there…”
“Officer…” The man
to Jim’s left interrupted. “This man is in shock, this is neither the time nor
the place for such questions.”
When the officer
nodded the procession of four made their slow way to the waiting ambulance on
the other side of the trailer.
From out of nowhere
the image of the black cat streaking across the road in front of his car
surfaced. It would seem the direction from which the animal came had been the
harbinger of bad luck, he thought, as the surrounding light disappeared and gave
himself up to the darkness that suddenly engulfed him.
