She opened her eyes. A biting wind blew frigid snowflakes onto her face. She blinked, eyes stinging, and forced herself to focus. Slowly, she realised the windscreen of the car wasn’t where it should be. Tiny shards of glass lay scattered across her lap, twinkling on top of her silky white dress. A snapped tree branch hung suspended between her and the driver, reaching through the broken windscreen, the ragged pale edge sharp as a knife. She let out a long, shivering breath.
It was her wedding day.
She brushed the glass from her dress and unclipped her seatbelt. Pain radiated from her ribs. After spiralling off the icy road, the car had run into a field and hit a huge, bent oak. She remembered how the seatbelt had jammed into her chest, the way it squeezed the breath from her lungs when the car collided. Gently, she pressed a hand against her throbbing ribs and winced. Bruised or broken? She wasn’t sure.
A moan came from the driver’s seat, and she turned her head sharply towards the sound. The man lifted his face from the steering wheel and groaned in pain. The sight made her stomach flip. Blood dribbled down his lips and chin, gushing from the place his nose used to be. You could hardly call it a nose now. A mishappen lump would be more accurate. His mouth opened, and gurgling red saliva trickled down his bottom lip.
“Help me.”
She stared at him, eyes wide, unblinking, unmoved and numb inside. He raised a hand and reached for her, his fingers trembling and bloodied. Her gaze moved to the battered car door next to the man: they’d hit the tree trunk at an odd angle. The front chassis had crumpled in, trapping his legs. A long, thin shard of metal protruded from his stomach.
“Please.”
Instead of wondering if this man would live, she wondered if he would die.
His hand dropped to the seat, and his head tilted back. She made a decision about what to do next, and once she’d reached that decision, she felt lighter.
At first, he smiled, his lips twitching the tiniest amount, as she reached over the branch towards him. But then something changed. Perhaps he noticed the glint of grim determination in her eyes, or perhaps he was close to death already. Either way, she was grateful when he closed his eyes and let out a soft, resigned sigh. She pressed her hand over his mouth and that squashed lump of a nose, pushing down hard. As she’d expected, he was too weak to fight her. When his head shifted from side to side, she easily overpowered him, and soon, he was still. To be sure, she waited for twenty, thirty seconds. Then she tipped his head back to make it seem as though he’d choked on his own blood. She wiped red-stained hands on his jacket, then removed it from his body. She wrapped it around her shoulders for warmth before checking his pulse.
He was dead.
She opened the car door and searched the area for a phone. Annoyingly, wedding dresses rarely come with pockets, and her phone was in an impractically small, pearl-lined clutch bag with her almost-mother-in-law. But his phone… She remembered it flying from the vehicle. It had to be here. Somewhere.
Out in the open, the bare skin around her collar bone itched from the freezing cold. Her high-heeled shoes were closed at the toe, but still she gasped when her feet hit snow. She huddled with the jacket around her shoulders, checking in front of the car for sight of his phone. Finally, she found it, tossed ten feet away, the screen smashed. It was in bad shape, but still responsive to her touch. But before she tried dialling 999, she noticed the unopened text message bubble, and tested whether she could pull down the notification to read it. She could. It said: I’M GOING TO KILL YOUR BITCH FIANCE from an anonymous number.
Disgusted, she cleared the message and tapped in 999. There was a bar of signal, one bar… The phone rang. She brought tears to her eyes and trembled in the freezing cold. Her voice caught as the tears fell, and she explained what happened to the operator. They’d been on the road, searching for an elderly wedding guest who’d wandered off in the snow. They’d lost control and hit a tree. The driver hadn’t made it. She was fine, but the snow…
“Where are you?” the operator asked.
“I don’t know the road name. About five miles outside Rookthwaite. The snow is coming down fast. I can hardly see the road. And I’m so cold.”
“Can you stay in the car?”
“No, the windscreen is smashed. I’ll freeze.”
“We’ll get someone to you as soon as we can, but this storm is causing problems. We need to contact Search and Rescue,” the operator said. “It’s going to take time. Can you get somewhere warm?”
She remembered seeing a leaflet on top of the cupholders in the car. She hurried back to the vehicle and grabbed it. She’d seen these pamphlets all around the hotel and they had a map inside. The wedding planner had talked a lot about an old cabin for hunters and hikers, tucked away somewhere nearby.
“There’s a bothy,” she said. “I don’t think it’s far from here. I have a map. If I can follow it in this storm.”
“Okay,” the operator said. “You need to stay warm and keep your phone on.”
She hung up, pulled the jacket around her throat, and started walking through the bleached gloom.
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