Near Death Read Online Free Page A

perfectly and inexorably cocked up. During the long painful walk back to the car park, Alex’s eyes burned with tears. He hated the look of despair in his father’s flushed face and the brittleness of his mother’s quietude. And he resented his brother for being able to let the loss slide off him easily enough to turn the full boreof his attention to chatting up a pair of blondies in red jerseys.
    Just north of Birmingham, Alex was resting his head on the window and sleepily staring at the hypnotic chain of headlights coming at them across the divided motorway. Suddenly, he felt deceleration as his father was forced to adjust his speed to accommodate a slow-moving truck that had lumbered onto the left-hand lane from an entrance ramp. Just behind the truck, a Volvo estate car slowed and flashed its brake lights and his father pumped his own brakes a few times to keep off the Volvo’s rear end. He swore under his breath and checked his sideview mirror to see if it was safe to pull into the middle lane but it was not. A Yamaha motorcycle was ripping past their car before pulling even with the Volvo.
    The driver of the Volvo had the same thought of overtaking the truck but the motorcycle must have been in his blind spot because as he changed lanes he merged directly into the bike and set off the first link in a fateful chain reaction that would ripple through time and unexpectedly alter the world—strangely.
    The door panel of the Volvo kissed the rear wheel of the bike, sending the little machine careening into thefast lane and onto the median where the rider fell off and snapped his neck. The Volvo driver reacted instinctively to the contact by sharply turning his wheel to the left. He reentered the slow lane and caught the front end of Dickie Weller’s Vauxhall hard at a catastrophic angle.
    At the moment of impact, Dickie saw what was happening and loudly swore,
“Bugger me!”
    Alex experienced the next several seconds in a weird slow motion. He’d once been on a plane to a family holiday in Tenerife and the sensation of the car going airborne reminded him of the moment of takeoff. His father always thought seat belt laws were an insidious part of the nanny state and none of them were belted as they began their barrel roll.
    At first Alex was more fascinated than alarmed. The weightlessness and down-is-up feeling inside the spiraling cabin felt like an amusement park ride. It was only the sickening crunch of contact with the paved shoulder that jolted him into terror and then there was nothing.
    Until—
    The car was righted, wheels back on ground.
    He was aware of pain—a brutal pain—in his left leg and a fuzzy throbbing in his head. His mother’s bucket seat had collapsed onto his lap and he felt the weight of the seatand her body pinning him down. She was moaning, a low primitive vibration that scared him. He saw her right arm limply hanging down between the seats, blood streaming onto her pretty charm bracelet. There was no sound at all from his father. Dickie’s head was pitched forward resting against the steering wheel, his Liverpool cap miraculously in place.
    For some reason all Alex could think about was his brother, who incongruously wasn’t in the car anymore.
    “Joe! Joe!”
    The back window was blown out and fresh night air whistled through.
    The fire began with a
pop
that lifted the whole car a few inches into the air and set it bouncing back on its tires.
    Petrol from the ruptured fuel lines had ignited somewhere under the driver’s seat and had spread retrograde to the tank. After the terrible rumble of the explosion, Alex felt the heat and his lungs began to fill with stinking plumes of burning gas.
    Then the awful yellow and blue flames.
    He tried to wriggle free but his legs were pinned and his lower body seemed fixed in concrete. The plastic on thedash and kick panels started to sizzle like a load of bubble and squeak on the breakfast griddle.
    He felt the flames licking his back, heard