href="#litres_trial_promo">Chapter 28
Blue lights … that’s his first lucid thought after he opens his eyes.
He can’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds, a tiny micropause in his head. But the world seems so strange, so unfamiliar. As if he weren’t quite awake yet.
Blue reflections are dancing around him. In the rearview mirror, bouncing off the concrete walls, the roof, the wet road surface, even off the shiny plastic details of the dashboard.
A car. He’s in the driver’s seat of a car, going through a long tunnel.
The pain catches up with him. He has a vague memory of it from before he blacked out. A brilliant, ice-blue welding arc cutting straight through the left-hand side of his skull and turning his thoughts into thick sludge.
He can even identify the way it smells.
Metal, plastic, electricity.
Something’s happening to his body, something serious, threatening his very existence, but weirdly he doesn’t feel particularly frightened. He tightens his grip on the steering wheel, feels the soft leather against the palms of his hands. A pleasant, reassuring sensation. For a moment he almost gives in to it and lets go, tracing those smooth molecules all the way back into unconsciousness.
Instead he squeezes the wheel as hard as he can and tries to get his aching head to explain what is happening to him.
‘David Sarac.’
‘Your name is David Sarac, and …’
And what?
The car is still driving through the tunnel, and one of the many incomprehensible instruments on the dashboard must be telling him that he’s going too fast, way too fast.
He tries to lift his foot from the accelerator pedal but his leg refuses to obey him. In fact he can’t actually feel his legs at all. The pain is growing increasingly intense, yet in an odd way simultaneously more remote. He realizes that his body is in the process of shutting down, abandoning any process that isn’t essential to life support until the meltdown in his head is under control.
‘Your name is David Sarac,’ he mutters to himself.
‘David Sarac.’
Various noises are crackling from the speakers: music, dialing tones, fractured, agitated voices talking over each other.
He looks in the rearview mirror. And for a moment he imagines he
