Wreck

'This looks pretty bad, mate'

I felt my brow twist with anxiety and my neck jerk away from the guy as my cloudy mind tried to digest what-in-the-f**k he had just said. 'What?' I asked, clear as ever. The man simply turned his back and started pacing towards his ute. He said something to the old guy who started shivering where he stood. I could barely hear his shoes clip-clopping against the road over my somersaulting heart.

The old guy looked over at me rubbing his hands against his jeans and let out a short high pitch yip of excitement. His pupils darted up and down my body as the new guy produced a red tool box from the back of his ute.

He placed it on the ground with a thunk and fiddled with the lock for a few seconds before it screeched open. I stared at the man who clattered his way through tools. 'Why?!' I shouted, hurting my throat. The man ignored me completely, and his hand emerged from the box holding some tool that looked like a huge pair of scissors. He ran his finger along the rusted edge of the blades and walked back to the car whistling a tune casually.

I struggled against the metal as hard as I could as he pranced towards me and his old friend giggled like a school girl. With a percussive bang I managed to free my right arm from the mangled steel and clawed hopelessly at the metal trapping my left arm. I swore at him and begged and pleaded through tears and mucus as I pulled my body away from the passenger seat and felt my trapped arm move an inch or so, but the pain was so unbearable I had to stop.

The guy with the shears was only a step or so away and I pawed at his hip in some primal, desperate attempt to ward him off. He clutched my hand with his left hand which made me realize how weak I was in this state. I turned away from him as best I could and babbled mindlessly hoping it would all be over soon, tears and sweat streaming down my face like I was in a sauna. I may as well have been.

As my mind raced with the threat of my bloody death I heard a contrasting, sweet tone playing from a low-quality speaker. Was it, the Beatles? Lucy in the sky with diamonds. I recognized that lovey-dovey melody immediately as the struggle came to a grinding halt and the man let go of my hand.

It was a mobile ring tone playing from his pocket. He pulled the phone from his pocket and swiped to answer, fumbling with the shears in his left hand. After a brief, unintelligible conversation he slipped it back into his pocket and barked 'Let's go' to the old guy before packing up his toolbox and driving off in his Ute.

It had all started so suddenly and ended just as quickly as it had begun, yet I just sat there frozen for his whole departure. Dazed and dumbfounded, I watched the old man shoot me one more glance then hop into his vehicle and drive off over the horizon.

I cried and cried for what felt like hours after they were gone. I had a lump in my throat and my body was pretty much devoid of moisture, but it was better than that long-haired f**k with the giant scissors having his sick way with me. I ran the situation over and over in my head until my mouth was dry, and my muscles had almost completely given out. The thought of those two strangers coming back to kill me while I was trapped in my car roared in my brain.

I couldn't come to a logical conclusion as to what had just happened to me, but one thing was for certain; I had to get out of this f*****g car. I reached over my body and touched my left shoulder with the tip of my finger, poking and prodding to try and get some kind of feeling back into it but couldn't get a response from my nerve endings. I leaned to the right as best I could and pressed my feet against the floor as hard as I could without hurting myself and managed to get a fraction of an inch of my arm free.

I had a decent rhythm going, stopping when the pain was too much then resuming once I had recovered. I pulled, inch by painful inch for so long that the pain had become dulled and eventually flung out of the cab and slammed hard onto the road. The freedom had never felt so good, and I beamed with happiness as my coworkers and my mother embraced me and Piper from accounting kissed me passionately.

I knew that whole scenario was a feverish hallucination brought on by a cocktail of shock, dehydration and dopamine being released to ease the pain in my left arm but I tried hard to cling on to it as a reality because it was so much better than the one I was living, the one where I was trapped in a car wreck with no other human contact aside from two potential serial killers that could come back at any minute.

The thought of yanking my arm as hard as I could to force it out of its position crossed my mind, but so did the thought of my shoulder dislocating as I did it or the muscle fibers simply tearing away from my torso, snapping my bones with an almighty clap, and watching my severed arm twitch back and forth, still stuck against the passenger seat.

The lump in my throat had graduated into a pressure under my tongue over the last hour, and my lower back was throbbing relentlessly against the leather upholstery of my seat. It had been about 12 hours since I drank anything other than gin at least, and even longer since Id eaten anything. I thought about where I would be if I werent here, but I was so emotionally drained that I couldnt even cry about it. All reserves were running on fumes.