moving into the trees that line the path to the road. Had I still been in the car, I would never have known he was there.

Julian crosses the road to where his car is parked and starts to work the key into the lock. I turn back and race to my own car, then wait until I hear Julian’s starting before I start mine. Out on the road, I see that he is about three blocks ahead of me. The fog that had attached itself to the cemetery and church has just as strong a grip out here, only the street lights make it look thinner.

Julian turns left. I turn my lights on and begin to follow him. I can just make out his tail lights through the fog about two blocks away.

The occasional car comes towards us. Julian drives around

the cemetery, then turns towards town. He starts to drive faster and I do the same, knowing if he gets too far ahead I’ll lose him as soon as another set of tail lights appears. He races through the intersection, and I follow suit. He isn’t making any evasive manoeuvres, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t figured out I’m

following him. And it’s quite clear that if he parked out on the road and snuck past my car he didn’t want me to know where he

was going.

The lights ahead turn orange. Julian makes it through. I put

my foot down, gaining on him a little more quickly than I would have liked, though I’m pretty sure he’s not going to …

Only I don’t make it all the way through the intersection.

The car emerges out of the fog like a train. I turn my head

towards it, then lift my hands up to cover my face as it slams into me, the shrieking sound of metal loud enough to make my ears

bleed.

For a few moments there is nothing but madness as I scramble

to gain control of the car, but it’s impossible. There is another explosion of sound as I come to a stop, and then nothing as the world slowly darkens around me.

chapter twenty-nine

Alcohol and burning metal. That’s all I can smell. The windscreen has shattered into thousands of tiny diamonds. The engine has

stalled, the front of the car has folded around the lamppost.

The hood has twisted and bent up into a V, and from beneath it plumes of steam are rising and mixing into the fog. More steam is coming through the air vents into the car. The stereo is going.

The heater is going. There is a high-pitched ringing in my ears.

The lamppost is on an angle. Its fluorescent light has busted

and sparks are slowly raining down on the car. I can taste blood and bourbon. There is a pain in my leg. My chest. There is pain everywhere. I tilt my head back, close my eyes and wait for it all to disappear. It doesn’t.

My neck hurts when I move, but I manage to unclip my

seatbelt. The door is buckled and there is safety glass all over my lap. There are chips of paint on my hands, cracks in the dashboard, and sharp pieces of plastic sticking up. One of my fingernails has lifted up and bent all the way back, a few threads of skin the only things stopping it from touching my knuckle. Before thinking too much about it, I wipe it backwards across my leg so that the strands of skin stretch and break and the nail sticks to my pants and stays there. The door won’t budge, so I try to climb over the passenger seat. It is then the floodgates open and pain wracks my body, one knee jamming into the handbrake, the other into the mostly empty bottle of bourbon that has somehow jumped from the foot-well and onto the seat in the crash. It is all I can do to not cry out as I push open the door and stumble out to the road. My feet skid on stones and glass, and I fall onto my knees.

The world is caught in the grips of an earthquake, but I’m the only one feeling it. I get up and balance myself by holding onto the side of the car. There is a shooting pain rolling up and down my leg-The glow from the traffic lights changes colour as one set goes red and the other green. Glass grates beneath my feet as I move, pieces of it cutting into the soles of my shoes. There is blood on my shirt and pants and more of it flowing down the side of my face. I reach up and pull away fingers covered in blood. Only one of my eyes is focusing.

I look back into the car at the empty bottle of bourbon, and

I understand instantly that its contents have brought me to this. I lean in and grab it, then pitch it into the distance. It disappears into the night. Jesus is looking down at me from above the hovering fog, his eyes open, his mouth in a tight smile. He is looking into me, but he is not admonishing me. He is too busy.

His hands are wrapped around a bottle of McClintoch Spring Water. The bourbon bottle crashes and the sound brings the world into focus. It tones down the ringing in my ears and allows a flood of other sounds to pour in. I look away from the billboard and wipe smoke and blood from my eyes, and I move away from my car to draw in clean air.

The abyss gets deeper.

A woman is screaming. It’s a high-pitched note that threatens to break the windscreens of other cars pulling over. Ahead of me a four-door sedan has spun around in the intersection. The front of it is completely caved in. Clouds of steam surround it so I can’t tell if anybody is inside. The screaming is coming from a woman ^ho has pulled over and has probably thought her entire life that she would take action in a moment like this and is quickly finding

she can’t. She has opened her car door, stood up but hasn’t gone any further. Another car is starting to pull over.

I reach the wreck first. I push my arms into the steam and

touch metal, pushing myself close enough to see inside. There’s a woman in there, slumped over the wheel. She looks young.

Like me, she had no airbag. I try opening the driver’s door, but it’s jammed. The woman’s eyes are open; they are rolled into the back of her head and her jaw is pushed forward, either broken or locked, and there is a steady stream of blood coming from the left side of her mouth. I pat down my pockets and find my cellphone but can only stare at it in my hand.

‘Out of the way, buddy,’ a man says, reaching past me. He tries the driver’s door too, then moves around to the passenger side, and it comes open with a loud screech. He looks over at me. ‘You gonna use that thing?’

I look down at my cellphone. It has survived the crash, but

still I can only stare at it.

I have just become the very thing I hate the most. I have

become Quentin James: full-time drunk and part-time killer.

chapter thirty

They want to take me to the police station but my injuries require otherwise. I sit in the back of an ambulance and nobody talks

to me. A paramedic tends to my wounds but he doesn’t really

seem to be putting any energy into it. Like everybody else he’ll be wishing I was the one who was dead.

After a while a policeman takes a statement from me. He

doesn’t know who I am. Doesn’t know my history. I tell him

what happened. He tells me that witness reports indicate I ran a red light. That it had been red for at least two seconds before I hit the intersection. He asks if I’ve been drinking. I tell him I have, because he’s going to test me anyway. He pulls out a breathalyser and makes me say my name into it, as though he’s giving me an

interview and the breathalyser is a microphone. He looks at the numbers, then writes them down. I know what they’re telling

him. I’m way over the limit even though I feel sober. Killing a Woman will do that to you.

At the hospital I’m put up in an emergency ward with dozens

of other people. My bed has a curtain drawn around it. The cut to my leg is stitched up and bandaged and I’m told it will leave a scar. There are other cuts over my body too, other scars. The finger with the missing fingernail is cleaned, wrapped in gauze and bandaged. There is a cut at the top of my forehead which gets stitched. Blood is cleaned off my face. Safety glass is plucked out of my knees. My scraped-up palms with tiny pieces of shingle in them are cleaned.