Senses Short Story Competition - Winner

I stay in the middle lane because the lorries are nose to tail in the inner lane. In the outer lane grey and black wedges slash past far over the speed limit, racing home into the setting sun. My old engine is pushing its limit at just over seventy. Someone behind flashes me to go faster. I ignore them. A minute later they swerve out into the fast lane and accelerate away. I fall back a bit from the truck in front of me. Instantly another car leapfrogs past into the space. A minute later it is gone again, cutting out in front of an Audi which hoots angrily, then chases off after it. Only another few minutes to the junction and I will be out of this.
I don’t see what happens, but suddenly the long curve of the road ahead is full of flaring brake lights. Time slows. The lorry ahead swerves out suddenly into the fast lane and a black BMW slams into its back, bounces off the barrier and is lost from view in a cacophony of screaming brakes and horns. I am trapped in the middle, not daring to brake too hard because in the mirror looms the rapidly approaching lorry behind. A car spins ahead, its full beam headlights blinding me for a second. To my left an articulated lorry squeals and jackknifes slowly sliding out in front of me, to flick the spinning car out of its way. I steer left to avoid it and the side of another lorry looms metres away.
The airbag slaps into my face with a great bang, and there is the heavy salt taste of blood in my mouth. An end noise of crunching, screeching metal and the windscreen pops with a bang, the car wrenched along. I ball down into the bag, pull my knees up, trying to get as little as possible, as the car contorts around me. Something bangs into my right side, presses painfully into it, then another great jolt and the car angles forward, then slams down. The pressure eases briefly. More screeching, another great jolt, the steering wheel suddenly pushing hard into me. Then movement stops, the sound of horns and brakes and bangs moving away like some frequency shifted thunderstorm. I hear someone screaming nearby.
I try to move, to pull the airbag down so I can see, but my right arm will not move. I scrabble at the bag with my left, clawing at it, force it down to reveal only barely lit metal bars through the shattered windscreen ahead. It takes a second or two for me to realise that it must be the bottom of the lorry that turned across me, that my car is half jammed under it. I try to move again, but even my legs seem to be jammed by something. There is the sharp tang of metalwork classes in the air. I breathe deeply trying to stop the panic and try to turn my head to look left, but I can’t. The roof presses on my head. I move my hand up to feel the metal that presses down on me. I push with my legs, gain a centimetre, and that is enough to slowly turn my head and look left along the side of the lorry.
Through my crazy-cracked window there is a broken sports car jammed almost next to me, a popped out window showing a bloody face leering at me. I know at once he is dead, for the head is at an impossible angle to the body. Beyond is the source of the screaming, another bloody face with blonde hair. No way out that way, for the wreckage of his car is jammed against me. I turn my head the other way carefully. That way the door has buckled against me, but my leg and arm feel normal. They can both move, but only millimetres. Through the window I can see the barrier only a couple of metres away, cars still going past on the other side. I am trapped. I will have to sit here, wait for help I try to breathe deeply, searching for calm.
I smell petrol now, getting stronger. Fuel is leaking somewhere. But as I sniff I realise there is another smell, the smell of plastic smoke and I hear a woomf and the smell starts to get much stronger. I start to panic again, try to pull the airbag away, to try to see what has caught my arm. It looks all right from what I can see, it is just that the door has bulged in and pinned it. I work it slowly, and it starts to move, then is suddenly free. I have two free arms and a head that just moves. I start to cough, the smoke smelling of plastic and oil, heavy, sickly. I feel on the edge of total panic. A siren is getting louder and louder, a glimpse of blue lights with orange hazard lights from the other carriageway. Smoke billows across my view, thickening, not a smell now but a foul taste now that overpowers the tang of blood. I am coughing continuously. A great whoomf and a glare of orange from my left and the screaming rises to a terrible pitch then cuts abruptly. I cough and cough, the smoke acrid, foul tasting and I know am going to die here, trapped, burning, the heat already building.
Out of the right window blurred figures leaping the barrier and I shout, as I have never shouted before, the scream ripping at my throat to leave me choking. Someone in a fluorescent vest pulls at the door, swearing, shouting and someone else is helping them and I push stupidly with my right arm as well and it pops open and they pull madly at me and I come out a bit and then I am stuck again and one reaches over me to pop the seatbelt. There is pain as they drag me out, drag me away from the car, from the heat and the flames and I glimpse my car’s back wheel burning and another whoomf as the my fuel goes. They drag me away along the barrier, away from the heat, then pause, gasping. and I watch my car fireball and feel the heat of it on my face as they help me under the barrier into their police car, move it a bit further away from the flames.
They stop twenty meters further down, the other side of the fire.
‘Stay in here!’
They run back towards the fire. They are so brave. I should do something, but I just open the door and am sick, blood and black stuff, followed by yellow acrid-tasting vomit. I feel better and look up to watch the fire spread, watch the soft smoke blurred lines of the mangled vehicles become stark and apocalyptic as the gentle twilight fades and the brutal street lights take over illuminating the chaos.
The policemen who rescued me come back. One says for me to lean on him. We reach an ambulance and I sit down by it. The ambulance crew are working on something covered in blood inside. The policeman sits me down and tells me someone will look after me. They go and I realise that I never said thank you. I promise myself I will.
I should phone Jess to say I will be late. I grope in my pocket and pull out my phone. The screen is cracked. I call Jess.
‘I’m just in a meeting, can it wait?’
Suddenly I am shaking all over.
‘You have to come pick me up,’ I say.
‘Are you all right? What are those sirens?’
‘I think I’m okay, ‘ I say.
‘What’s happened?’
I am about to tell her when the ambulance crew come out, kneel beside me, and ask me where it hurts. I point to my leg and they ask me about what happened, where was I trapped and check me all over. They cut my jeans away to get at my leg and that does not seem so very bad, just a deep cut. They bandage it. One of them feels my head gently. My hair smells funny and she tells me it is singed.
‘You seem to be more or less all right,’ one says, ‘but you still need to go to hospital.’
I nod. ‘Thank you.’
‘I think she is still on the phone,’ says the other, and I register amongst the sirens and hiss of water from the fire engines that the phone is still live, that Jess has been listening quietly. ‘Jess? You still there?’
‘Yes. Ask them what hospital?’
‘Bradford Royal Infirmary,’ one says.
‘I’ll see you there.’
They help me into the ambulance. The person they had been working on has been covered up neatly and is still. We drive quietly to the hospital and I almost fall asleep.
I am helped into casualty and I am glad to sit quiet in the bright lit room. More ambulances arrive and stretchers with terribly injured people are rushed past me. People keep coming to check on me, say that I will be seen soon. Then Jess arrives and her familiar smell and voice next to me is more reassuring than anything else could ever be.
‘You were so lucky’, she says when they have cleared me to leave and she has helped me into the car. ‘It was on the news as I drove to the hospital. More than fifty vehicles, and they say there are several dead. You were so lucky.’
I just nod, but I think of the woman screaming and the man with his head hanging, of the silent shape in the ambulance, and I am terrified the whole drive back.