Oh, yeah. Marlboro.

With a picture of a pair of charred, weeping lungs, and some kind of warning I can’t read. Cyrillic, maybe. Whatever, the message is clear. These things aren’t good for you …

I’ve been here before. I’m caught in a loop.

Pictures … words …

The same pictures, the same words, echoing in my head …

Then sliding away. Sliding beyond my grasp.

There’s a day sack in the passenger foot well. Still in slow-mo, I release the safety-belt and lean towards it, clutch its handle, drag it on to the seat.

I see an eagle, wings and talons outstretched.

A manufacturer’s logo, almost obscured by a smear of blood, stamped on to the stripy steel missile a hand’s width from where it has punctured the skin of the wagon’s grey leather upholstery. My blood, I reckon. I give it a wipe. There’s a string of letters and numbers beneath.

Adler …

Adler Gesellschaft.

I repeat the words aloud. I have no idea whether they’ll be of any use to me, but try to fix them in my mental databank. I need something to grab hold of. Something solid.

It isn’t happening.

Above and beyond the missile: branches. Branches, covered with dark green needles. Pressed against the window. I swivel my head and shoulders to the left. Same on my side.

I’m in a malfunctioning dark green car wash. I need to get the fuck out of here.

I lean back. Bend my knee. Raise my foot above the dash. The wagon starts to tilt with me as I push at the screen with my boot. The safety-film balloons outwards, then bursts. A few fragments of glass lose their grip on the laminate and sprinkle across the bonnet. The rest cling on, but now I have a porthole to look through.

Cool air rushes in, heavy with the scent of pine.

More branches, left and right.

At the centre, sky.

A lot of sky. Sky of the brightest blue. A canopy of blue, rising from a distant jagged grey snow-topped mountain ridge.

That grinding sound again. The nose of the wagon dips far enough for me to see what’s directly in front of me.

Nothing.

A break in the trees.

A sheer drop.

Rock.

Rock.

And more rock.

Pasture.

A river snaking through a valley.

Maybe four hundred below. Maybe more. My eyes aren’t focusing too well.

Someone – fuck knows who – once told me it takes about five seconds for a falling body to reach terminal velocity. So how long before I hit the dirt? I have a feeling I once knew how to work out shit like that.

Now all I know is that it’s the distance between living to fight another day and being totally fucked, once and for all.

I try the door.

No joy there. My palm slips off the handle. Jammed solid. Bent panel.

And the window won’t power down.

I take a deep breath. Sit absolutely still. For fuck’s sake, I need to get a grip here.

I wipe away the sweat on my jeans and feel something solid under my right thigh. The shape seems familiar. I bring it out into the open. A pistol.

I know about pistols. Not sure why.

I remove the mag, eject the round from the chamber; realize I can run through this drill blindfolded.

I close my palm over the top slide, so that enough of the muzzle protrudes from the bottom of my fist to smash it against the corner of the side window, immediately above where the part number is etched. I don’t need to do it twice. There’s a crack and a pop, a shower of sparkly bits and a whole lot more fresh air where the glass had been.

I unzip the day sack, then shove the mag and the weapon inside. Looping its strap over my right arm, I brush away the remnants of the glass from the edge of the frame with my left sleeve, get my arse off the seat and start to lean out.

With a noise like tyres on gravel, the pointy end of the wagon drops even further and its tail comes up. The trees on both sides do their best to hang on to it, but they’re losing the battle. I grab the nearest branch, bend my knees, kick hard and launch myself out of the cockpit as it gives a final lurch and disappears over the edge.

I manage to hang on, but my hands are on fire. As they slide down the branch, pulled by the weight of my body, needles and splinters of bark tear into my flesh. I search for some kind of purchase with my toecaps but that just makes things worse. From the waist down I’m hanging into space.

I tighten my grip. Work my way back towards the trunk, hand over hand. It’s not just my palms that are burning now. My shoulder muscles are too. I somehow manage to swing one knee on to firm ground, then pull up the other.

The dull crump of an explosion echoes across the valley. The wagon’s fuel tank must have ruptured as it bounced off the rock face. The first spark would have ignited the fumes.

I don’t look down. I can’t.

The world’s biggest fireworks display sparks up inside my head. A wave of molten lava forces its way up from the pit of my stomach, setting my chest on fire as it goes.

A jet of weapons-grade vomit spews out of my mouth.

I can’t remember the last time I vomited.

I can feel myself frowning as I look at the sticky, brightly coloured stream that seems to be connecting my face to the bed of brown needles below it.

Then the pool of vomit rises up and smacks me between the eyes and the darkness rushes in again.

2

I don’t know how long I lay there.

I thought I was drowning, to start with. Drowning in a mountain lake. No. Drowning in a pool of vomit. My own vomit.

‘Nick …’

A man’s voice.

Clipped. Precise. Eastern European.

‘I need your help, Nick …’

You need my help?

That can’t be right. I can’t even help myself.

‘I need your help … I don’t know who else I can trust …

‘Don’t know who else I can trust …

‘Can trust …

‘Can trust …’

My head was an echo chamber.

Somewhere deep inside what was left of my brain, a drumbeat sounded.

Pounding.

Insistent.

‘This is not a drill …’

More drums. A guitar, maybe.

‘This shit is for real …’

I raised my head.

Fuck, my face stank. It was coated with puke. I was lying beside some trees, fir trees, on a bed of dank brown and yellow pine needles. I grabbed a fistful of them and wiped away as much of the puke as I could.

Then something made me rake over the needles so that there was no trace of it on show there either, and cover my tracks as I scrambled beneath the trees.

I felt my right arm jerk back. The strap of my day sack was looped around a low-hanging branch. I unhooked the thing and deposited it on the far side of the largest trunk I could reach, then crawled after it.

Took a couple of slow, deep breaths. A couple more.

I rolled over and lay on my back. Struggled to slow everything down. I knew I was in the shit. Physically and mentally. But I had no idea why.

I shut my eyes tight, opened them and looked up through the trees. Brown. Green. Little diamonds of blue. Sky, maybe? Fragments of colour, like fragments of memory. They seemed to make sense for a moment, until I lost my grip on them again.

To try to get my thinking straight, I decided to count backwards from a hundred. I was vaguely aware that that was what a doctor would ask me to do. What I would ask someone to do if I thought they’d taken a blow to the head and lost a few marbles.

Did that mean I was a doctor?

I knew I’d given my brain stem enough of a rattle to fuck up my short-term memory.

And I knew some other medical shit.

Morphine syrettes …

Field dressings …

Tourniquets …

I knew that when you took a round in the thigh you sometimes had to dig around and grip the soggy end of your femoral artery between thumb and forefinger to stop yourself bleeding out.