Cast Iron

Chapter twenty-three

When consciousness returned it brought only darkness. Bertrand’s eyes flickered open and saw nothing. Neither could he feel anything, except for the constant tattoo of rain on his chest and face. Where the raindrops touched his skin they felt like needles. His clothes were soaked and immeasurably heavy. Almost heavier than the limbs he seemed incapable of moving.

There was no sensation in his broken leg now, as if it had been amputated while he slept. He was unable to feel his feet. His hands seemed huge, swollen and clumsy.

But, even as he gazed into darkness, the world about him slowly began to take form. Shadows delineating shapes. The silhouette of a fallen tree. The bowed and sodden leaves of autumn fern. Hard black rock shot through with seams of marbled limestone. And they were moving. Slowly crossing his field of vision from right to left.

Then the sound of a motor. And, filtering through the fog that filled his head, the realisation that a vehicle was coming, the twin beams of its headlights raking this barren landscape, a place that had somehow trapped him for a day and a night in its dead arms.

With an effort that robbed him of almost all his remaining strength, he rolled on to his side and found his right hand grasping the broken branch of a fallen tree. Strong enough to support his weight as he used it to get himself to his knees, pulling himself up to transfer that same weight on to his one good leg. He stood, trembling on it, swaying in the rain, using the dead branch to keep his balance.

What had begun as the distant sound of a vehicle’s engine had turned into a roar that filled the night. Its headlights, set high in the cab of a tractor trailer dragging a huge container behind it, burned out the landscape like an overexposed photograph. Bertrand levered himself forward, almost blinded by it, transferring weight between his left leg and the broken branch, his other leg dragging uselessly behind him.

By some light in the cab he could see the face of the driver, pale, focused, averted in that moment from the road, concentrating on something that he held in one hand. And it dawned on Bertrand that he was either sending or receiving a text on his mobile phone. He waved his arm uselessly and shouted at the huge, lumbering vehicle as he tried desperately to put himself level with the road. But even as he forced himself on he knew he was too late. The driver hadn’t seen him, and the great sweep of its wheel arch caught him a glancing blow that threw him back into the undergrowth, broken branches and briars tearing at his clothes and his skin, leaving him unconscious and barely breathing.

And still the rain fell.