DREAMRAIDERS

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

You take me higher

Under your spell

Higher and higher

Christabel

I'm hot with desire

I'm burning in hell

Each time you come alive.

gk

Wayne undid his seatbelt, leaned across the centre console of the car and gave Sarah a peck on the cheek to make up for the argument. He didn't get the reaction he expected when Sarah screamed out.

'Wayne!! Look out!!'

The huge branch of the big old gum tree that had been struck by lightning moments earlier was blocking the road directly in front of them. Travelling at 110 kilometres per hour, Wayne immediately went into panic mode and hit the brakes. Wrong—the road was wet and greasy—the brakes locked up and the car to fishtailed out of control. With the windscreen wipers struggling to clear the torrential rain, he couldn't see clearly and veered onto the wrong side of the road. Almost immediately, the glaring headlights of an oncoming vehicle blinded him.

'Swerve Wayne swerve!! Swerve!' Sarah screamed.

Her hysteria made Wayne panic even more. He pulled hard on the steering wheel to miss a head-on, and crashed through a kerbside barrier over an embankment. The car sailed through the air and landed with an almighty thump in a paddock. They were thrown around inside the car like rag dolls. But the fall to earth hadn't slowed the car it was still travelling at speed and totally out of control. Being wildly buffeted about inside the car from it bouncing violently over the uneven terrain, Wayne had no control— and then it came into view—Sarah was first to see it: a gargantuan high-tension tower and they were aimed directly for it.

For Wayne time had slowed down—the windscreen wipers seemed to be moving in slow motion—drops of heavy rain splashed on the windscreen exploding into tiny droplets. With a vague look in his eyes, he slowly turned his eyes from the oncoming metal legs of the high-tension tower, to glance at his wife beside him. He noticed that her face was contorted—she was screaming but he could hear nothing. He peered over his shoulder at his son and saw that he too was screaming and yet he heard nothing. The only sound he could hear was a strange hum. With their fate sealed, Wayne took a moment to acknowledge his wife with a look of love that she, knowingly, returned.

Right then the business end of the event returned at normal speed for Wayne—the cacophony of screaming, engine noise, rain battering the car and the relentless pounding over the rugged ground, exploded in his ears. When he looked back through the windscreen it was just in time to see the nose of the car crumble, as it collided with the metal legs of the high-tension tower and there followed a thunderous crash! It was the discordant sound of metal on metal, bending, twisting, and breaking. With his seatbelt unfastened, the force of the impact catapulted Wayne through the windscreen, across the mangled bonnet, and forcefully into the tower. An avalanche of glass accompanied him from the shattered windscreen.

Sarah's face and arms were blasted with shards of the windscreen. Her seatbelt was fastened and the airbag inflated to save from her from hitting the dashboard. Just when it seemed the mayhem was over and the car had come to a rest, Mother Nature had one last card to play: a bolt of lightning cracked from above and struck the tower. Wayne's mangled, entangled bloody body, strung up like a puppet on the metal legs, convulsed unnaturally, as though he was performing a macabre dance of death. Then suddenly, it ceased—he fell limp—all life had been expelled—the mayhem had ended. The rain stopped, thunder rumbled in the distance to underscore the chilling moment, and Sarah, in a semi-conscious stupor, smelt the unmistakable stench of gasoline. A new threat had materialized. With steam rising from the mangled engine the car could burst into flames at any second. Somehow, in her delirium, Sarah reasoned they were trapped in a time bomb set to explode, and that she needed to do something about it, quickly. The only sound she could hear was a constant high-pitched whistle, like the sound you hear after a loud rock concert. Looking like a post-test crash test dummy, still strapped in her seat, stuck behind an airbag and surrounded by a tangle of twisted metal, her face oozing blood, Sarah miraculously began to move. Battling to remain conscious, there was something bigger than her predicament driving her. Sensing the preternatural eeriness of the situation, having to overcome the pain of her injuries, trying to ignore the threatening stench of gasoline, she managed to reach a blood-drenched shaky hand in between the seats and unbuckle the safety harness that restrained her unconscious son.