FIFTEEN
Years earlier Purkiss had taken an amateur interest in the concept of time and the psychology of time perception. He’d concluded that it was all to do with attention. The more one concentrated on an experience, immersed oneself in it to the exclusion of all distractions, the more slowly time appeared to pass.
There were few experiences more likely to hold the attention than being fired upon by a man advancing in a car at high speed on the edge of a drop.
Purkiss’s first instinct was to brake. Instead he gunned the engine. The Toyota jolted forward and at the same time he dipped his head. The first of the shots smashed a star into the windscreen and the bullet hit the headrest of the seat. His front nearside bumper caromed off the rear door of the Lexus on the driver’s side, but the man kept control of the Lexus so that it didn’t spin. Purkiss was past him and rounding the curve, but already the man was turning using the handbrake. He had the benefit of the more powerful engine and already he was gaining.
With the heel of his hand Purkiss did what he could to clear a hole in the sagging mesh of the windscreen. The cold air hit him hard and clear. In the side mirror he saw the man taking aim again. At the last minute Purkiss swerved into the oncoming lane, just for an instant to put the man off, and it worked because the bullet sang wild but here was an oncoming car. Purkiss jerked the wheel back just in time as the car blared past. The bumper of the Lexus grazed the back of the Toyota and then jarred it harder. Purkiss thought about slamming on the brakes, which would certainly stop the Lexus but would also send the Toyota over the side.
Another curve to the left, and when Purkiss saw the other lane was clear and the Lexus was a few feet back, readying itself for another shunt, he hauled on the handbrake and began the turn just as the Lexus surged forward again. Its bumper got the rear of the Toyota on the left in a spray of shattering rear- and brake lights. The impact helped Purkiss complete the spin through a little under one hundred and eighty degrees. He was facing in the opposite direction but the man was fast and as Purkiss passed him, his face close, he raised the gun and fired. Purkiss jerked his head back in time to feel the slipstream flick the pinna of his ear before the shot smashed out the passenger window.
The wrecked windscreen blasted his face with a funnel of cold air and petrol fumes and burnt rubber. He sucked it in, the smell of life in all its rawness. In the mirror the Lexus had turned again, of course, and was after him once more. A remote place in his consciousness registered the earpiece which had dropped out on to the seat, Abby’s tiny voice piping from it.
He put his foot down, the speedometer barely visible under the coat of glass fragments. Eighty, eighty-five kilometres per hour. Instinct told him the next shot was coming and he ducked, hearing the ricochet sing off the tarmac. He understood the man was doing what Purkiss would have done from the start. He was aiming for the tyres.
Purkiss began to swerve like a slaloming skier, doing his best to stay within the lane because another car had shot past up the slope, the driver’s face a confused smudge. Another shot flicked up from the road surface and this time clanged off the chassis somewhere. Purkiss checked the petrol gauge and the rest of the dials. Nothing crucial had been hit yet. He hadn’t been counting the shots, but in any case the man might have another magazine, so it made no difference.
He realised suddenly that he needed to take the opposite tack to the one he’d tried previously. Instead of trying to outrun the Lexus, something he was never going to manage, he had to keep it close enough behind him that the man would struggle to hit his tyres. He jabbed the brake, too hard, don’t stall the damned thing, and the Lexus bore down, but the man saw what he was doing and slowed himself. He hung well back so that the space between them grew, and in the mirror came the flash of the muzzle. With a sound that to Purkiss could have been a Zeppelin springing a leak the rear passenger tyre exploded. The Toyota slewed round so that Purkiss was presented side-on to the man. He braced himself for the next shot. It didn’t come, because the Lexus was advancing again at speed. The man was going to ram him.
Purkiss spun the wheel into the direction in which the car was swerving, aware that he was straddling the road and an oncoming car wouldn’t have time to brake. The front of the Toyota was close to the bank beyond which was the drop down into the forest, the darkness below looming like a living presence. The Lexus rammed him just behind the driver’s door, the side of the Toyota buckling and compressing him and the impact shunting the Toyota so that its passenger side hung poised over the edge. The man’s face was close again, separated from Purkiss’s by the narrow gap between the opposite-facing cars. Teeth clenched, eyes narrowed, he raised the gun. Purkiss ducked but the shot didn’t come. Instead he felt the Toyota rock as the Lexus disengaged. He knew the man was reversing, getting ready to ram him a final time and send him over the edge.
One chance.
He felt the revving of the Lexus’s engine transmitted through the road and the chassis of his own car. When he judged it was almost on him he grabbed one of the phones from the passenger seat and straightened, took a split second to aim, and hurled it through the open window at the driver, a good solid shot that caught the man in one eye. Because the missile was coming in at an angle from the left the man flung up his left hand, which meant that his right hand dragged downward on the steering wheel, causing the Lexus to veer to the right. At the same time Purkiss floored the accelerator of the Toyota to try and pull it out of the path of the oncoming Lexus. With two wheels over the edge of the drop, all the Toyota could manage was a couple of inches forward. The Lexus slammed into the Toyota behind the rear door, and in a grinding of chassis against rock the back of the car heaved over the edge.
Purkiss felt the jar of the seat against his back as he was flung against it and the world tilted crazily, the sky far above the treetops suddenly and incongruously in front of him through the mangled windscreen. The weight of the car bore down behind him. Helplessly he began to be dragged down with it. He turned his head to the left and saw the front of the Lexus tipping downwards, the chassis pivoting on a point just behind its centre. The phone he’d thrown had put the driver off his aim so that he’d rammed the Toyota just obliquely enough not to lose his own momentum, and he’d been unable to stop the Lexus’s front wheels from crossing the edge of the drop. Purkiss groped with his left hand for the release button of the seatbelt and found it crushed by the impact, the clasp jamming the belt in place. Reaching across with his other hand he picked up the other phone from where it lay against the back of the passenger seat. The car continued its relentless grind backwards, and he transferred the phone across to his left hand and began to bash at the seatbelt clasp, feeling plastic splinter. Across from him through the open window of the driver’s door he saw the face of the driver, florid and contorted, as he leaned forward against his own seatbelt. As Purkiss watched the man freed himself, the seatbelt rolling up with a snap. The man toppled forwards against his windscreen, and the movement was enough to push the Lexus the final few inches. With a groan it passed the point of no return and plunged out of sight, the man’s scream drowned in the noise of smashing wood and rending foliage.
Something gave in the seatbelt clasp. With both hands Purkiss pulled the belt free and disentangled himself and jackknifed his body so that he was reaching up through the remains of the windscreen. He fell back, and the impact of doing so jarred the car so that it slipped down. He twisted his head round and, through the gap where the rear window had been, he saw that the back of the car was propped against the base of a pine trunk which protruded at an angle from the slope. It was a youngish tree, and even as he watched it was shifting, its movement accompanied by the graveyard sound of roots tearing through soil.
He faced the front again, drew breath, and expelled it as he jackknifed again, abdominal muscles on fire. This time he caught hold of an exposed root. He got his other hand round it and hauled, but it was giving way and so was the trunk behind and beneath the car. He got his feet against the back of the seat and pistoned his legs just as the loop of root broke free at one end and the car dropped away from him. For a moment he was hanging in mid-air from one end of the root, before he got a purchase on the slope with his other hand and pulled himself up. Behind him was the awful screech of metal against rock and ancient wood and a final plummeting grind punctuated by the smashing of glass.
Then, nothing but the hammering in his head and his chest.