His arms were thrown out before him, so it was possible his forearms had absorbed the brunt of his high-speed contact with the safety glass… That would have spared his skull from the primary impact. But the amount of blackish red blood pooling on the crumpled dashboard (it was actually steaming, in the late autumn air) told a different, darker story.

As the fact that Jake was dead slowly registered with her, Tina began to sob. He hadn’t been good to her, and some small part of her cruelly rejoiced at the prospect of never having to hear him scold her again, but he was Jacob Michael Cumberland and he deserved to live as much as anyone. 

Tina cried for her dead husband for ten full seconds before the realities of the last three years inexorably thrust themselves to the forefront of her mind. Jake was dead. And that meant she was in a lot of trouble.

“Oh, God,” she breathed as the shock of this realization ran straight to her bones, where it became a chilling fear for her life. And that of her child, if their unborn daughter was somehow clinging to life within Tina’s stomach.

The mobile phone in her purse suddenly became the eerie center of Tina’s universe. The phone was her only chance.

She’d always prided herself on her focus of mind, when called upon to concentrate. Now she did that, reducing the world to the distance of four and a half feet between her and the handbag below.

She reached up to her waist and braced herself for the abrupt fall that should follow the release of her seatbelt. But when the click of the button yielded nothing but an increase in the pull of gravity on her upper body, she realized that it wasn’t the belt that was holding her in.

Tina blinked at the mangled footwell wrapped around her legs. They throbbed steadily with pain and dripped a disturbingly constant patter of blood. She was “trapped in the wreckage,” as a breathless anchor might say on the local news.

She strained her arm for the purse, reaching with everything she had. It was at this precise moment that Jake moved. Not the groggy, waking-up-from-a-head-injury movement that might have quieted her paralyzing surge of terror. Instead, his body merely shifted, the languid slither of a python moving into position to wrap its coils around a rat.

Tina’s eyes flashed back to the purse. Just out of reach. She tried to retreat into pure concentration but (for the love of God!) her dead husband was extricating himself from the windshield he’d just brained himself going through.

Tina kept perfectly quiet, as if it would matter, and looked around for something with which to hook the purse and lift it to her. Meanwhile, Jake made a guttural sound — somewhere between a growl and a whimper — and pulled his head back into the car. It made a sickly scraping sound as he heedlessly did more damage to himself.

Tina’s gaze inextricably flicked to the man beside her. 

Jake’s face was gone — completely gone — and she was confronted with a slick red mass of tissue veined with glimpses of whitish skull. Worst were his eyes. Jake’s baby blues weren’t gone, but they weren’t blue, either. One eye was crushed into his head and the other popped halfway out. That one tracked her lazily, the pupil swimming in a sea of blood. 

For better or for worse, this thing bore no resemblance to her high-school sweetheart.

Tina lost it then, screaming wildly and with full throat. She flailed madly for the purse, simultaneously wriggling in her seat like a hooked flounder. There was no escape, however, as her agonized legs were still hopelessly tangled under flattened steel.

Jake tried to crawl over the gear-shift to her but his spine was separated in two places and he seemed to have no control below the shoulders. She was lucky there. He laboriously dragged himself along the dash, actually crawling over Tina’s purse. When he moved along, the handbag was suffused with cooling blood.

Tina searched madly for a weapon, anything she could grab and turn on the monster clambering after her. Nothing was within reach but Jake’s coffee thermos, jammed into the beverage holder. She fought to yank it out — its stainless steel had been dented in by the crash — and swung it back and forth, hammering back Jake’s flailing hands.

He groped for her wrists, clawing the air, and she pulled back for fear of being scratched by his nails. If that happened, it was all over.

As they stared at each other, Jake making hungry snuffling sounds through his mouthful of broken teeth, comprehension hit Tina like a thunderbolt.

She started to laugh, a brittle, deranged laughter that wholly drowned out Jake’s feral moaning. 

He couldn’t reach her. In his broken state, there was no way for Jake to lift himself high enough to get at her pinioned body. 

She hung there for some time, how long she had no idea, and stared at him with a flood of contradictory emotions cycling through her.