Chapter 6 - The Edge of the Abyss
"Brace yourself, Leo!" Clara screamed.
The jackknifed semi-truck blocked ninety percent of the bridge span. Behind her, the massive grille of Richard’s Escalade was less than three feet from her rear bumper, roaring like an iron bull. Richard wasn’t braking; he was betting she would flinch, pull over, and yield.
He didn't know his ex-wife at all.
Clara didn't swerve toward the river, nor did she hit the trailer head-on. She spotted a three-foot gap between the semi’s crushed cabin and the snow-packed concrete embankment—a narrow maintenance shoulder meant only for highway workers.
She dropped the transmission into low gear. Instead of slamming the brakes on the black ice, she pumped them rhythmically, wrenched the wheel hard right, and pulled the emergency handbrake with a violent tug.
The Subaru snapped into a deliberate four-wheel drift. The passenger side scraped along the corrugated guardrail with an earsplitting shriek of tearing metal, sparks raining into the frozen river fifty feet below.
Richard, caught entirely off guard by her suicide maneuver, slammed on his anti-lock brakes too late. His three-ton luxury Escalade had too much forward momentum on the sheer ice. The SUV spun out in a wild three-hundred-and-sixty-degree loop, rear-ending the stalled eighteen-wheeler with a brutal, sickening crash that set off both front airbags in a cloud of white powder.
Clara’s battered Subaru shot through the maintenance gap, clearing the semi by barely two inches. The car popped back onto the cleared two-lane blacktop on the other side of the bridge, coughing black smoke and radiator fluid.
"Mommy... are we flying?" Leo asked from under the wool blankets, his voice barely louder than a breath.
"No, sweetheart," Clara whispered, her hands shaking violently against the wheel as cold wind roared through the shattered back window. "We're on the ground. We made it."
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Ahead in the blizzard, a towering neon cross illuminated the falling snow: St. Jude County Memorial Hospital - Emergency Entrance 1 Mile.
Cliffhanger: But behind her, through the rear-view mirror, the crumpled driver's side door of the wrecked Escalade flew open, and a bloodied Richard Vance stepped out into the road, pulling a sleek black handgun from his coat.
