The car judders violently to a halt.
‘We ran out of petrol,’ says Wil.
A veil of high tensile steel mesh fixed with special bolts and galvanised plates is draped over a steep rocky embankment to their left. What passes as a hard shoulder is a strip of asphalt less than a metre wide, below a fringe of loose rocks. Wil steers into the strip and parks the car.
‘Get out. It’s not safe,’ he says, after a pause.
Normally, Hannah is the more risk-averse one, the more anxious. Even now she finds herself wondering how deep they had to drill the boreholes in the embankment to fix the steel mesh in place. Wil’s voice has a quality she doesn’t recognise however, a remote quality, as if he’s imagining something far worse than she is. Pulling the handle to open the door, a front of freezing cold air
