It all happened so suddenly: Olivia slammed on her brakes and swerved. Her car skidded and spun around, the wheels clipping the bank, causing it to flip over, the scraping of metal against tarmac as it landed on its roof, eventually coming to a grinding halt in a ditch. Olivia could hear the screams of her friends as pain ripped through her legs. And then she blacked out.
When she came around the car was the right way up. Her clock flashed amber in the darkness. 01:05. She’d only been out for five or six minutes. There was a deathly silence. No sounds from her friends. Her heart hammered as she remembered. Oh God, oh God. Were they okay? Were they injured? Did I hit the person in the road?
Olivia tried to move but as she did so she yelled out in pain. One of her legs was pinned beneath the steering-wheel column, which had crumpled downwards, trapping her. ‘Sally?’ She turned towards the passenger seat. It was empty. Where was Sally? She tried to look behind her, craning her neck towards the back seat, expecting to see Hetty and Tamzin, dreading that they might be dead, but they weren’t there. Panic welled within her as realization hit.
She was alone in the car.
Had they gone to get help? But they were in the middle of nowhere and Hetty had a mobile, a pink Nokia. She was so proud of it. She had the best job out of the four of them; an assistant pharmacist. Either Hetty or one of the others would have used that to call the police, or an ambulance. Their bags were gone too. There was nothing in the car to suggest they’d ever been there. But they wouldn’t have just left her. One of them would have stayed. Sally, definitely. Her best mate.
Olivia started trembling uncontrollably as pain and fear gripped her, turning her insides to ice as she remembered how the accident had happened in the first place: the figure in the road, which was now empty, stretching into the seemingly dark void.
Who had it been?
And where had her friends gone?