With one last groan, Luke heaved himself out from beneath the wreckage.
He had thought something like this would be impossible, that the pain would simply be unbearable, but the truth was that he didn’t really feel anything at all. He certainly didn’t feel anything in his legs, even though they must have been completely shattered when the car overturned, and he was only vaguely aware of a dull sting in his arms where the glass from the shattered window had sliced into him.
Adrenaline, he thought as he dragged himself by the arms along the dirt. It’s just adrenaline. He knew that, but he also knew that meant he didn’t have much time. Once that adrenaline wore off … Stop. Don’t think about that for now. Just focus on getting out of here.
With his teeth clenched hard, he continued dragging himself up out of the ditch that the car had swerved into. “Joey!” he called. His voice was hoarse and strained, but at least he could still speak at all. “Joey! Can you hear me?!” His voice echoed down the lonely country road like he was in a cave, but no one answered. “Fuck.” He spat blood through his teeth. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Where the hell is he? Luke didn’t know how long he had lost consciousness when the car crashed, but when he came to there had been no sign of his friend in the upside-down driver’s seat. So that means he got out, he reassured himself. That means he’s alright.
He kept repeating those thoughts, over and over again in his head, as he crawled his way to the top of the ditch. He glanced around one last time at the car wreck, and wondered how he and Joey had not died instantly: it was overturned on a sea of shattered window glass, and it looked nearly completely flattened. Stop gawking and focus, idiot, he scolded himself; he had to act before the adrenaline wore off, while he was still numb to the pain. Judging from the way his legs would not move at all, though, he had a grim suspicion that their numbness had nothing to do with adrenaline. Focus! One last push, and he pulled himself out of the ditch and back onto the tarmac of the road.
And then he found Joey, lying flat on his back, his face caked in blood. He wasn’t moving.
“Joey!” Luke tried to stand, tried to run over to him, but couldn’t even get his knees to work. So instead he crawled once again, ignoring the glass pushing deeper into his arms and drawing more of his blood.
His heart sank when he finally reached him, and saw just how bad his closest friend’s injuries were: his pale blonde hair had been dyed crimson from a deep, menacing gash down his forehead that still oozed rivers of blood that streamed down his fac. The left side of his face was already showing its bad bruising, and his arms were studded with shards of glass. The sight brought tears to Luke’s eyes, though he knew he couldn’t have looked much better himself.
“Joey!” he called again desperately, and slapped at his cheeks clumsily, since he couldn’t quite move his fingers. “Joey, please, come, can you hear me? Come on, wake up!”
Tears had begun to leak down his face when Joey’s bloodied eyelids flickered open. “Oh,” he mumbled weakly. “So that wasn’t a dream.”
“Jesus Christ, you had me worried there for a sec.” His tears didn’t stop, but they were tears of relief now. “Are you hurt?”
“Gee, I’m not sure,” Joey muttered flatly. “Think I might have a little cut or two. Got a first aid kit handy?”
Luke thought he might have hit him if he had the strength, and if Joey’s injuries hadn’t looked so bad “Fucking hell, this isn’t a time to joke, this is a serious! Did you call ambulance?”
Joey just stared up at the sky, as if he saw something Luke couldn’t. “I was going to. I climbed out here to get reception, but then I … I just collapsed. I don’t really think I move anymore.”
“Okay, okay, don’t worry,” Luke breathed, though he was speaking to himself as much as he was to Joey. “We’ll call an ambulance, and everything will be fine. Where’s your phone?”
“I must have dropped it. I’m not sure if–”
“It’s fine, it’s fine, I see it.” He wasn’t sure what had become of his own phone in the crash, so relief flooded him again when he spotted Joey’s just a few feet from where he lay. “It’s fine, everything’s going to fine,” he repeated as he dragged himself over to it. The pain in his arm was growing stronger, and he felt the glass stabbing into his arm more sharply each time he pulled himself along the tarmac.
The phone’s screen was badly cracked, but not unusable. It took Luke several tries to get his shaking fingers to swipe up to press the emergency call button, and the phone dialled. He had never had to call the emergency services before, and so he was not sure how long it normally took, but –
“Nine-one-one operator, what is your emergency?” a woman’s voice bloomed in his ear.
“Yes!” Luke exclaimed, though he was not sure why. Did I really not expect them to answer? “Yes, yes, hello, my friend and I were just in a car accident, I –”
“What’s the location of your emergency, sir?”
“We – we’re on the road about halfway between Yewbrook and Harbourdale, I – I’m not sure where exactly.” He had to pause to suck in a deep breath. Why am I so short of breath? Climbing out of the ditch had not been that exhausting.
“And what’s your name?”
“Luke Hale.” Why do they need my name?
“Is anybody injured, sir?”
“I – my friend –” He looked back to Joey. He lay completely motionless except for slow blinks. The tarmac around him was soaked red now. “We’re both injured, but I – I think my friend’s lost a lot of blood. He says he can’t move.”
“Is your friend conscious?”
“Yes, he is, but –”
“Sir, please calm down and speak clearly.”
Luke resisted the urge to shout back that he was calm, that they needed help now or Joey was going to bleed out and die. He really was short of breath now. He practically had to suck in quick breaths between each word. “Yes,” he said as steadily as he could. “He’s conscious.”
“Okay, sir, an ambulance is on the way. Please stay on the line.”
“Luke,” came Joey’s voice, still flat and bland.
Luke beamed over at him as he did his best to ignore the pain spreading through his upper body. “It’s fine, Joey, it’s fine! There’s an ambulance on the way; we’re going to be okay!”
Joey, however, said nothing. He just stared up at the sky.
Luke began to pull himself across towards Joey again, though much slower than before. He wasn’t sure if it was the adrenaline beginning to wear off, but it was suddenly much more difficult, and much more painful, to crawl. He was vaguely aware of the operator’s vice coming from the phone, but he ignored it. He had to make sure Joey survived until the ambulance came.
“Hey, hey, are you alright?” His words came out in one barely intelligible mumble. Jesus, what is wrong with my breathing? There wasn’t any pain in his lungs or throat. “Just hang in there, there’s an ambulance on the way. We’re gonna be fine!”
“It doesn’t matter now.” Joey’s own breathing seemed shallow too.
Luke narrowed his eyes at him. “What? What are you talking about? Everything’s going to be okay!”
“Luke. Please, stop.” Tears glistened in Joey’s eyes. “Look around you.”
And so Luke did. Blood, so much of it that it pooled in the crevasses of the tarmac like puddles, clearly marked the path that Luke had crawled out of the ditch and across the road. Far too much blood; almost as much as the pool around Joey. In a panic, he frantically listed off the symptoms of severe blood loss in his head: Light-headedness. Cold and pale skin. Confusion. Weakness. Rapid heartrate. He slowly moved trembling fingers to his heart, and found it beating as fast as a firing gun. The last symptom hit him like a hammer. Rapid, shallow breathing.
“We’ve both lost a lot of blood,” Joey went on, “and we’re in the middle of nowhere. An ambulance won’t reach us on time.”
He collapsed back on the tarmac next to Joey. The phone skittered out of his hand, the operator still speaking through it, trying to get their attention. He joined Joey in staring up at the bright blue morning sky, marred only by a few streaky clouds. “We’re dead,” he whispered.
“Yep,” Joey muttered wistfully. “Suck, doesn’t it?”
Luke couldn’t help but laugh at that, though it was more wheeze than laugh. “That’s exactly what you said at your dad’s funeral. I remember everyone else was just … bawling their eyes out, and I asked you how you felt, and … you just said ‘it sucks’.”
Joey returned the laboured laugh. “Well, it did suck. Crying wasn’t gonna change anything. It wasn’t gonna bring him back.” He exhaled slowly. “I wonder if I’ll see him again soon.”
“What, you mean like in heaven?”
“Yeah.”
“Hah! As if you have a religious bone if your body.”
“I don’t, but considering the circumstances, I’d rather believe I’m off to see my dad instead of just … nothing.”
Luke watched as a lone cloud drift overhead, casting them both briefly in shadow. Nothing. That sent a shiver jolting through him. “Do you think if we start praying now, God will let us in?”
“I hope so. He’s meant to be all merciful and loving, right? It’d be a pretty shit deal to die at twenty-one and find out there’s no heaven.”
“Or maybe there is, and we’re just not allowed in.”
“Why, you got any sins to atone for?”
Luke considered it. He had never done anything bad, not really. So is this happening to me? Why do I deserve this? “Just one. You remembered when I borrowed your Xbox controller? The blue one?”
“The one your dog broke?”
“Well, it wasn’t really my dog.”
“You prick. I knew it was you.” Joey rasped another laugh. Luke was only able to recognise it was laugh because it was the exact same sound he made.
My dog. He would never see Patch again, never finish teaching him how to give high-fives. He would never finish teaching his brother how to play guitar, or make good on his promise to cook his mother dinner for once, or play golf again with his dad.
The blue sky above was distorted as tears began to well in Luke’s eyes again. “How the hell are we joking? At a time like this?” For a moment, he feared the worst when Joey didn’t answer, but he finally spoke with a strained voice.
“I dunno. What else are we supposed to do? I keep waiting for the whole ‘life flashes before your eyes’ thing, but it doesn’t like that’s happening.”
Luke closed his eyes for a moment, closing his lids on warm tears. “What was the point of all this?” It was beginning to hurt to speak now, even to draw those shallow breaths, but he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t let himself die in silence.
“Of all what?”
“This. What was the point of being born if we just die like this?”
“Oh. Maybe there isn’t a point.”
“So all this … so everything is just … meaningless?”
“Maybe. I dunno. I never really bothered thinking about that stuff, since there’s no way of really knowing. Maybe … maybe it’s just as simple as being able to say you were happy.”
“Happy?”
“Happy about being alive, even if it was for a short time. Are you happy you lived, Luke?”
“I …” The words froze on his tongue. He could feel the tears streaking down his face, but he did not think he could have so much as raised an arm to dry them now. All the strength had left him. “I … I never even got to tell her how I feel. I never achieved anything.”
“That’s not true.”
“Of course it is,” he said with a deep, shaking breath. “I’ll never graduate for college, now. I’ll never get a job, I’ll never get married. I’ll never start my own family. I … I never got to make the world a better place. How can you say that’s not true?”
“Because …” Joey sounded as if he was struggling to speak now, too. “You … you were my friend, Luke. My best friend, and you were always there for me. When my dad died, when Tara broke up with me … Always.”
“Joey –”
“Will you shut up for a sec’? It’s already hard enough to speak. Just – just look at me.”
Luke tried to turn his head, but it was like his whole body had stiffened, like rigor mortis had already set in. But he managed to turn his head, despite the stiffness and the pain, to stare at his friend. Joey looked a complete mess, his face completely red now. His own tears did nothing to wash away any of the blood, but he looked right into Luke’s eyes. “Life’s never want you want it to be, I know. But you made my life a whole lot better just by being my friend. I know it’s not exactly what you were hoping for, but you did make the world a better place for me. Can you live with that?”
Luke smiled again, and ignored the taste of blood in his mouth. “I can die with that.” It was a stupid joke. Not funny at all. And yet the two of them laughed through their tears, despite the glass sticking out of their farm, despite the fact that neither of them could have moved an inch if they tried.
The two of them laughed, until they couldn’t anymore.
Luke couldn’t have asked for a better sound to die to.
