Stepping Outside Oneself - A Paranormal Suspense Read online

  Chapter 3

  Sirens.

  Sirens.

  There were sirens, far off. At least two sets.

  I groaned.

  This was definitely a downside of living in Milford, near the hospital. Hopefully the ambulances would move out of earshot soon and let me get back to sleep. Because I was exhausted, so exhausted, and I’d had the strangest dream.

  The sirens grew louder, closer, and I reached to pull the pillow over my head.

  My hands wouldn’t lift.

  I blinked my eyes, but they were stuck shut with something gummy.

  Now other sounds eased into my consciousness. The steady hammering of rain on pavement. The nervous murmur of voices not too far away.

  “Do you think she’s alive?”

  “God, look at that car. I’ve never seen a mess like that.”

  “She’s lucky she hit that parked tractor trailer. If she’d gone off the road and out over that cliff …”

  Pieces began sorting and connecting in my mind.

  I’d been driving.

  There’d been a storm.

  I’d seen my sister in the road.

  I tried again to open my eyes and this time I got the right one half-way there.

  The steering wheel was up above me, suspended from the ceiling. And the sky had turned angry. Hard. Almost a black sheet of –

  I was upside-down.

  I could feel it now. The pull of gravity. The way my shoulder-length hair fell past my face in the wrong direction, brown waves visible out of the corner of my eye. My legs were wedged in beneath the dashboard but my arms hung free.

  Was I hurt?

  Of course I was hurt. The bystanders had thought I was dead. The question was how badly I was injured and when help –

  There was the sound of running feet and then a skid as someone slid to a stop beside my door. A man’s voice, deep and steady, said, “You hang in there. We’ll get you out.”

  I turned my head toward the sound. I only made it an inch or two but it was enough. He was in his late twenties – just a few years older than me. The man’s short, dark hair was soaked in the rain and he wore a black EMT uniform. A vinyl bag of supplies was at his side. His dark eyes were moving attentively across my body, taking in every detail.

  Then his gaze came back to me, and I felt it. Something I’d been missing every moment since Mary had died.

  The feeling that someone was there for me.

  His voice dropped lower. “You’re going to be OK. What’s your name?”

  “Sarah.”

  A voice from behind him called, “Fire department’s ten minutes out, Mike.”

  Mike shook his head. “She’s losing too much blood. I’m taking her out through the window.”

  I was losing blood?

  It was hard to tell. I didn’t feel anything at all. Light from the ambulance’s headlights filtered in oddly through the spiderwebbed front windshield. I didn’t see any metal pieces emerging, stalactite-like, through my chest, but one never knew.

  I looked up at Mike. “Am I –”

  “Don’t talk,” he advised, leaning in through the window. I realized now that it was gone. There were pieces of blunted glass around the edges, but it must have been smashed during one of the car’s rolls. “I’m going to check your neck for injuries. But, risk or no, I have to get you out. We need to get those wounds staunched.”

  He leaned in and began carefully running his hands along my neck.

  It was surreal. It’d been years since I’d had a man this close to me. Sure, I’d dated in high school and college. Mary and I both had. It’d always been tricky. There’d always been the guy who wanted to date one and then the other, to see just how identical we were. And then there’d been the guys who’d wanted to date us both at once. Finding a teenage boy – or, heck, any man under the age of forty – who could see past all of that was a rarity.

  But once Mary was gone, the thought of having another person in my life … any person …

  The vision of her standing before me in the road, her eyes on me, hit me again. I groaned, “Mary.”

  Mike stopped and leaned back, his eyes on me in concern. “Was there someone else in the car?” He looked around the mangled wreckage in near disbelief.

  I tried to shake my head but nothing moved. “No. She was in the road in front of me, in the rain. It’s why I swerved.”

  His brow creased. “Someone was in the road?”

  “My sister,” I clarified. “Twin sister. She’s dead.”

  He paled. “You hit her?”

  “No,” I groaned. “She died five years ago.”

  He blinked, and then understanding lit his gaze. He nodded and reached for his bag. “All right, then. We’ll talk about that later. Right now, I have to get that seatbelt cut.” He called over his shoulder. “Jordan, need a hand.”

  “Right here,” came the reply. “Here, give me that. I’ll go in from the other side.”

  The knife was passed over and Jordan’s footsteps moved around the car. Mike leaned into the window, cradling me in his strong arms. Dangling as I was upside-down, it was like I was a bat and he was my hammock.

  He murmured, “I’ve got you. You just keep breathing. In, out.”

  I gave him a wry smile. “Got it.”

  Jordan was there at the other side, the knife glinting in the headlights of their ambulance. “Ready?”

  Mike nodded.

  Jordan sawed the knife through the shoulder strap.

  I swung back as it released, but the lap belt still suspended me in the air. Mike snugged up his grip and then looked at Jordan. “Go ahead.”

  Jordan took in a breath, got a better grip with his hand, and then pulled through in one long, hard draw.

  Gravity returned to the world.

  I tumbled down into Mike’s arms, but he must have been a football player in another life – he held me as steady as a rock. Jordan reached in to untangle my legs and then Mike carefully drew me through the window-hole. He stepped back a few paces and then gently laid me onto a pale blue sheet of some sort.

  It felt odd to have ground beneath me. To have all my limbs laid out, ensconced in soaking-wet black long-sleeved shirt and yoga pants. One of my shoes was missing. I wondered if it was still in the car. It seemed so odd, one shoe on, the other off. I lifted my head to look for injuries –

  Mike gently pressed me back onto the ground. “You really have to lay still, Sarah. I’ll take care of you.”

  Jordan handed him a roll of bandages and the knife. Mike put the knife in at my waistband and began cutting down one leg. “I think you hit an artery. We got to get that sealed up first. Sorry about the pants.”

  I would have laughed if I had the energy. I was hardly worried about a ten dollar pair of sweats from WalMart. And my underwear was far from racy. My sister and I had raced on swim team since we were tiny tots – we practically lived in our bikinis. I was certainly not shy about my legs being seen.

  I wondered if the EMTs really did encounter people who were squeamish. Whose life blood was pouring out of them and all they could think of was when they had last shaved their legs.

  Mike reached the ankle and the fabric was free. He carefully propped my leg up and leaned forward with the bandages. “Just stay right like that, Sarah.”

  There were more sirens now and Jordan shook his head. “And there’s the fire truck. Well, they can work with the cops on getting the debris off the road. Little chance of an actual fire in this weather.” He looked down the road. “No wonder she had an accident, with the surface like this. Probably hit a stretch of near-pond and water-planed.”

  Tension roiled in me. “I did not. My sister was in the road. I swerved so I wouldn’t hit her.”

  Jordan spun his head, looking back up the highway. “Wait, you hit someone?”

  Mike shook his head, his gaze attentive on the bandaging. “No, no, she thought she saw her dead sister in the road.”

  Anger flared, billowing i
n my chest. “I did see Mary,” I insisted. “She was there!”

  Jordan eased back to my side, taking up the knife and putting it in at the other hip. “Pouring rain can do funny things to one’s vision,” he soothed me. He began cutting down the other leg.

  A cop walked over, heavy, pudgy, his eyes going attentively from the mangled car to my apparently mangled body. “Wow, what a mess. Need any help? What happened, she lose traction in this monsoon?”

  My voice was full of outrage now. “I did not! My sister was there! She stared straight at me!”

  Mike looked up in concern. “Sarah, calm down. I need you to –”

  “She was there! It’s been five years – five long years – and there’s no way I’d forget the way she – the way she –”

  Sharp pain coursed through my chest. It was the first sensation I’d felt since I’d woken up, and it erupted in on me in tsunami-like waves, growing, growing –

  The cop barked out, “Jesus!”

  Mike called, “Sarah, don’t –”

  Blackness.