The Last Time We Spoke Read Online Free Page B

consciousness. Like a flashflood, reality rushed in and she dropped her head back onto the floor, reeling from the information that now placed her firmly back in time and place.
    Her body started to convulse with fear and pain. Metallic tears trickled into her parched mouth. Her big toe pointed sharply downwards in spasm. She tried to lift her head again, but the morning leant on it as the sharp light of dawn escaped the confines of the prism to wash over the room.
    ‘Kevin! Jaaack!’ Carla’s voice lurched into space like a stretched cassette tape. ‘Kev?’
    She moved her head to the left. Her good eye scanned the room. It stopped at a twisted mound of clothes and limbs. Kevin – his bruised body at right angles to the wall. Motionless.
    ‘Kevin! Kev! Can you hear me, Kevin?’
    Nothing but the memory of her warped voice filled the ensuing silence. Her eye moved frantically on, searching for Jack. She didn’t expect to find him. He would have been in the garage when … He’d have escaped and raised the alarm. A complete circuit of the room. No Jack. She swallowed, relief sticking in her parched throat.
    She had to reach Kevin. But she couldn’t move. Not even lever herself up. Her hands were missing. Where were her hands?
    It took a moment to understand that they’d been bound so tightly behind her back she’d lost all feeling in them.
    After several false starts Carla managed, like a frog doing breaststroke on its back, to manoeuvre herself haltingly across the room. Her muscles were burning and her arms stinging where the tiles rasped off slivers of skin.
    About halfway over her body suddenly seized and refused to obey further commands.
    ‘Come on!’ Carla cried aloud, writhing on the floor like a dug-up earthworm. Kevin was so close.
    Like an Olympic athlete just metres from the finish line, she demanded complete concentration from every part of her body, her pain miraculously dissolving into the focus, and with one final burst she was upon him.
    She dropped into the small of Kevin’s back and sank her face into his shirt. It smelt of stale sweat and dried fear. How she loved to snuggle up to him on a Sunday morning, moulding to his craggy contours and helping herself to his toasty heat. Now his body was cold and unyielding.
    A heaviness spread across the room like dry ice. Carla lay there under the weight of this new reality, her will to live leaking from her body.
    Click . A distant, but distinct click . Then Mozart swept down the corridor and into the room. Mozart? The sound swelled, growing louder and louder until the room was steeped in music.
    Panting and perplexed, Carla gave over to it, the notes peeling back her fear to make way for other emotions, and her crying rose from a place she had never visited before.
    Four beeps grounded her. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Good morning. This is the five o’clock news on Thursday the twentieth of March . The radio alarm!
    Only when Carla’s sobbing had subsided and her gasps and gurgles were no longer loud in her ears, did she notice Kevin’s chest. Barely perceptible – she had to be completely still herself to see it – but there for certain … the gradual rise and fall of his ribcage as wisps of air threaded into and out of his lungs.

BEN
    They pulled into a deserted service station. Despite being at least an hour from the action, Ben’s heart was still hammering in his chest, and his head bursting with a crazy cocktail of people and panic. Everything was mixed up – the thrill, the buzz, the bad bits. He felt as if he was inside one of those extreme arcade games.
    Through the store window he could see a lone petrol attendant behind the counter. The guy was dressed in his regulation uniform and sporting a twist of white fabric on his head.
    ‘That dude with the turban,’ Ben said, turning to Tate, who was searching the footwell for the fuel cap lever. ‘He’s a Sikh.’
    Tate ground his teeth in reply. The sound – like chalk screeching across a