I sat up to a large ache in my head, a sharp jab of pressure that felt like an ebbing explosion behind my eyes. The lightning flashed outside the window again and my arms tingled as if in the reverberation of it.
“You fell asleep while working again. Wooow Mina, what’s wrong with you? You’re so unproductive lately, get out of your slump... You can’t even end a character’s life without napping. Just how bad has your life gotten, huh?” I stated sarcastically chiding myself.
But really I was covering up my fear and panic with humor to hide from the feeling that I had been thinking about death in one moment and actually almost died in the next.
‘Was I cursed?’
‘Would this be my fate, here was where I would go?’
I looked around the room and its meager furnishings. Not a single picture, not a single personal belonging anywhere to be seen. This could just as well be an old hotel, not the house I had been living in for five years.
“Twenty-Five Years of life and you could fit all the things you care about in a single bag. You sure are living...”
“Why do I have to live like this anymore?”
“Pssshhh, tch, Mina…”
“You aren’t living, this is just existing. And barely at that." I commentated while looking around the room.
The thunder crashed overhead and the front window lit up with bright reddish-orange light.
I yelped in surprise.
‘That had been so close. It was right outside the window, wasn’t it? But somehow I felt like it couldn’t be closer than it had been before, that had felt like it had hit the house.’
The light didn’t go away when the lightning flashed and I stared entranced... Inching closer to the window, sliding my slippers across the floor. I was almost too scared to look outside and see what it was that was encroaching on this miserable night of mine.
The light danced, and I finally peered over my laptop and saw it.
The guard rail burst outward, its jagged sharp edges twisted forward, ripped to shreds by the weight of what had smashed through it, and there were clear skid marks visible from where I stood.
“Yah! Oh my gosh. Did someone just go off the side of the cliff!” I sucked in a breath of shock.
“Ah, I need to call someone!” I reached for my phone and tried to turn it on, the screen flashed the empty battery signal and I cursed my stupidity.
I paused. “Mina, are you even human... Who doesn’t charge their phone when they are at home? You are an idiot...!” I opened the door to the heavy rain, took one pitiful look at it before steeling myself and charging out into its onslaught.
I ran with my eyes pointed at the ground, knowing full well that in this darkness I would see headlights with no need to look up and drench myself further.
Instead I peered over the edge, staring down to see if I could see the car. I knew that the slope carried down about fifty feet before hitting an edge that dropped off into a ravine and I wondered if there was any hope at all, or if the poor person was already gone.
Large trees and their mangled and broken bodies lay in every direction, pushed over from the weight of the vehicle that had flung mercilessly down its abode. The ground was wet and mushy mud in spots where it had left large dugout tracks from broken off metal. I gulped, looked down at my slippers and realized any time I had was precious to the person below, and my slippers would not be of any help down there in the mud and would most likely be even worse than trying to manage the messy terrain in my bare feet.
I slipped my feet out, then gently put one foot down at a time.
The moment my bare toes touched the cold, wet ground, I shivered from the temperature change. As soon as both my feet were out and as wet as the rest of me, I stepped into the grass beside the skid marks and knew immediately that this had been the right choice. My slippers would have become ruined instantly, by the soggy wet that squished around my foot and up in between my toes.
I walked down the empty area as fast as I could, almost at a sprint. Trying to move with the ground as it slid and squashed beneath my cold numbing feet and I gripped onto whatever I could so I wouldn’t tumble. After a few moments I saw the fire that lit the sky and as soon as I rounded a small bit of still-standing trees I saw the car that created it. A curtain of rain descended down from the skies almost relentless as I strained trying to see if I could tell if there were any survivors in the dim firelight.
But from the distance of even fifteen feet, I couldn’t tell what was happening in front of my own eyes thanks to the sheet of pelting cold raindrops. Yet, I knew that the car was burning internally someplace unexposed since the rain had not snuffed it out but knew that wouldn’t last forever. Staring in devastation and knowing what I knew about car crashes taking lives. I wondered if in this kind of instance there could be any survivors at all.
The flames danced in my vision and my eyes welled up as the smell of burning metal hit my nose for the second time in my life. I heard myself whimper and realized I had cried without even knowing.
The tears washed away by the rain faster than they could drop from my pain and fear-filled memories that produced them. And I sighed and wiped my face with a sopping wet sleeve that did nothing but push the water around my poor drenched skin.
“Hey, Is anyone there,” I yelled my voice a mere fearful call in the night.
I stepped closer, wondering when the downpour would stop and how I could help anyone in this state. I yelped as something soft, yet hard, fell under my toes when I went to take another step, I glanced down at the ground and peered closer through the bad light.
The ground moved, and I jumped back in alarm.
“Save Me…” A weakening male voice said into that growing, desolate abyss of darkness.
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