• Escape

    Prologue

    I pressed my face against the car window, hands cupped around my eyes, trying to see through the heavy sheet of frost across it. Leaning back, I wipe it off with a heavily gloved hand, then peer through again, searching through the stretched on white bank of snow.

    “Are we there yet?” Halle, my little ten-year-old sister, calls from beside me.

    My parents sigh in deep exhaustion. “No, honey. We’re probably still about half an hour away.”

    “UGH!!” She groans over-dramatically and throws her head back against her seat, her shoulder-blade length, light brown hair spreading across the head rest.

    I turn around to the very back seat, where my best friend, James, sits texting our other best friend, Maria, sitting right next to him.

    “Move.” I order him, and he frowns and leans over so he’s laying across the seat, his head in Maria’s lap.

    I turn around as far as my seatbelt would allow and lean forward to look out the back. When I found the same result, I started to turn back around.

    But then I saw the car.

    It just suddenly appeared out of nowhere, swerving along the road.

    “Uh, Mom. Dad.” I say, turning back around to face the front.

    “Yes, sweetie?”
    “There’s a car right behind u--”

    I got cut off as the car was suddenly thrown through the air.

    The other car had just crashed into us.

    It seemed like forever until we finally stopped spinning. I couldn’t tell which was up, down, left or right. The seatbelt cut off my oxygen and I stumbled along it as we were still in the air, and I threw it off.

    Yeah. Big mistake.

    I was thrown forward against the passenger seat where my head hit the headrest and I blacked out.

    It only went downhill from there.

    When I finally woke up, I was laying out on the snow. There was immense pain crawling throughout my body, and the first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes were colors. White, black, and red.

    The black was the sky.

    The white was the snow.

    The red was the blood staining the snow.

    I forced myself onto my stomach, and used my elbows and feet to push myself forward towards the mangled cars resting on the road. Underneath all the metal were six bodies. Each one twisted, broken, bloody.

    I slowly took in the situation, observing the crash, the police and ambulance now showing up, pulling me to my feet, slowly tugging me away as they removed the car bits and picked up the dead bodies of my family, friends, and the drunk driver.

    My life was under that car.

    And now it was gone.