The Dead Travel Fast Read Online Free PDF Page A

hesitated, shifting from foot to foot in indecision, not wanting to move further but knowing he had to. There was a horrible bubbling sound at the back of the whimpering. Steve couldn’t stand it, wanted to stop it, so he forced himself on. At first he couldn’t understand why the driver hadn’t moved; the front of the car wasn’t badly smashed up, it had pulled up short of the tree trunk. Only some low growing branches of the old gnarled olive seemed to have come into contact with the car.
    He turned his head to look at the driver, saw he was pinned back against the headrest, whose white leather upholstery was stained a slimy red. The twin forks of a time-hardened olive branch had burst through the shattered windscreen and skewered him to the seat. Steve forced himself to look at the injured manand understood the cause of the whimpered speech delivered in simple, almost nursery, Greek,
    “Can’t die, not me, not here, help me please; help, can’t die, not meant to.”
    One of the branch ends had gone through the flesh under his left armpit and the other had pierced his right shoulder, tearing a huge gash in his throat en route. Steve could see the blood gushing from this wound; he’d plenty of experience tending to accidents on excavations, and knew that if the arterial bleeding wasn’t slowed the man would die soon. He screamed to the woman to call an ambulance but she’d gone. The young man fixed him with the terrified look of a child, his large brown eyes imploring succour.
    Moving the twigs and olive leaves away from where branches had pierced the flesh, he could see the wounds clearly. They confirmed his initial diagnoses, the bleeding from the throat was the killer; the rest could wait. Now he was doing something he felt calmer, his hands stopped trembling as he probed the bloody torn flesh for the source of the bleeding.
    The terrified eyes of the young driver tried to follow his actions, mutely beseeching Steve to save him: he’d stopped crying and was silent. Steve found the gash from which most of the blood was pumping and tried to pull the flaps at the edges of the tear together. But the blood made it greasy and each time he tried his fingers stumbled and slipped against each other and away from the wound.
    He let go and bent to rub his fingers in the dust below the car to give them extra purchase; something he had only ever done before when bowling occasional off spinners on the cricket field, an image he was surprised to find flashing across his mind. He moved back to the bloody throat, caught the agonised but trusting look in the young man’s eyes, noticed how pale his face now looked and murmured to himself without thinking, “Drained of blood, he’ll die soon.”
    This time his gritty fingers found a precarious purchase on one flap of the wound and while trying not to let slip the hold of his left hand, he felt for the other fine lip of the wound with his right. Twice, three times he thought he had it, only for it to elude himand vanish back into the gore of the ruined neck. Then he had it: only a tenuous grasp, but if he could keep it, enough.
    He carefully pulled the edges of the laceration together until they overlapped and applied as much pressure as he could without losing his grip. The pumping of the blood decreased, then reduced to slow ooze that seeped between his fingertips. He just hung on there, frozen in the same position, not daring to move any part of his posture in case he lost his slight hold on the slippery nubs of torn flesh.
    He could never gauge how long he remained suspended there, all his senses concentrating on the feeling of his fingertips; it could either have been minutes or hours. But one thing he did notice was that, crouched down against one of the olive trees near the car, there was a man. Steve knew he hadn’t been there when he’d arrived. The man said nothing, did nothing, just watched. He was partly in shadow, Steve couldn’t see him clearly; he was wearing