Drifting in and out of consciousness, she was only ever aware of the underlying pain – even if only slightly. It was like someone else's pain, like someone had written about it in a heart wrecking story and now was telling her about it, and she tried to feel it the way the author had intended. Nevertheless, her brain knew quite well that the pain was real, the pain was hers. Something bad had happened to her, she just couldn't wrap her mind around what that was.
Slowly, she opened her eyes, and had to squeeze them shut tight right away as bright light blinded her. Was that the sun? It had been a cloudy day so far, she remembered but then again, she wasn't really sure of anything. The light felt unnaturally bright and hurt her eyes like a blowtorch would if you looked right into the white flame, even though they were closed.
Her head was slanted backwards, wedged against the headrest and the upper rim of the back part of the seat so she wasn't looking outside, she was actually looking up against the ceiling of the car, so she couldn't figure out why the sun would be so bright inside the car. She also didn't know why she would be in such a position, something must have happened to the seat.
Everything – her entire body – hurt and she couldn't breathe deeply, something she would have loved to do to make the dizziness go away. Something was pressing hard against her chest but she just couldn't yet find the strength to lift her arms and find out what was causing it.
Her ears rang, but she thought she could make out the sound of a horn in the distance. Was there anyone around? Should she be calling for help? Yes or no – it basically meant the same to her, she just didn't care. And even if she tried, she couldn't even gather enough breath to utter a whisper.
Her head spun and her chest hurt and she felt warm sticky liquid – was that blood? – trickle down her forehead, itching. She sluggishly raised a hand to give it a scratch and holding her fingers in front of her eyes, she could finally say for sure that it was blood, coming from a nasty gash across her forehead, most likely from when her head had hit the dashboard.
She let her hand drop, only to find that the steering wheel was not where it was supposed to be. The force of impact had driven the column forward, and it was now squashed against her chest. Panic set in, and she tried to wriggle free – against better knowledge – which caused fireworks of pain shooting up from her ribcage. Wave after wave of nausea flooded through her, made her taste bile at the back of her throat. Then, ever so slowly, all the noise and all the pain dissipated into a weird sort of peaceful darkness.
When she opened her eyes again, her neck hurt from the weird posture she was in. Cautiously, she twisted her head into an upright position. It took her a moment to understand where she was and what she was looking at. There was a tower of black and red – smoke? – in the distance. She blinked several times until she was able to really focus on it and found that it had not only grown in size but also drastically changed shape. Had she blacked out again?
She obviously was inside a car, a totaled car, as far as she could tell from the hood crumpled up against the broken windshield and the smoke trailing up from in between. Her brain sounded all sorts of alarms alarm – smoke coming from the engine block was never a good thing to see. She could almost taste the fear in the back of her mouth but either way, there was not much she could have done anyway, stuck as she was.
There was the fragmented question of that even being her car but then again, who would have cared? Kylie wondered why her brain even had time to come up with that kind of stupid queries but it seemed as if it needed to fill those empty moments to not go insane. Why again was she in this car? On this road?
Trying as hard as she could, she had trouble piecing together the last couple of minutes – or hours. How long had she been here? Her eyes lazily wavered over the individual furrows in the hood of her car until she could see the tree she had impacted and wondered how badly injured she was, as she couldn't really feel much from the chest downward but blamed that mostly on the steering wheel which was crushing her sternum and made her blissfully numb, so she didn't really mind the huge mushroom cloud looming over the city.
The airbag had deployed and knocked her back and sideways, which was most likely why her head had been in that uncomfortable position. Now, it was dangling limply from the steering wheel that was disturbingly close to her chest, from what her languidly exploring hands could fathom.
Her eyes fell shut a couple of more times and she shook her head to lose the wooziness but very soon wished she hadn't. All out of the sudden, it all came back and her mind went from zero activity to haywire, being as analytical as ever, she tried hard to remember, to piece together what had happened. She looked around, moving her head cautiously as to not hurt herself any more to try and get her bearings straight, which turned out to be quite difficult as she again felt dizzy and nauseous.
The Kaiju, the thermonuclear bomb, her parents…the mushroom cloud.
The precipitous shock of realization made her want to sit up straight, brace herself for what she knew was to come as soon as the shock wore off, but she couldn't move at all – and that wasn't only because she was wedged in between the seat and the steering wheel, it was because all her energy had drained away, like her life force had been taken in the same way her parents and her daughter had been taken, burnt out of her. She dry-retched, hot tears feeling acidy in her eyes.
She had been driving towards Lindfield – to get her parents and Emma out of the danger zone – to save them. The fiery cloud she saw so clearly told her more than she wanted to know. The bomb had been deployed and had exploded – as intended, with most of what was left of Downtown blackened by the blast. Had it killed the Kaiju?
Through the cracked windscreen, the looming column of smoke and fire that had once been the thermonuclear bomb unleashed on the Kaiju looked distorted – almost comical, insignificant, not hazardous at all. Her frenzied brain almost expected the monster to jump out of it doing a funny dance, maybe even flipping everybody off. Did Kaiju even have middle fingers to do that? Her brain reveled in that thought a little longer, coming up with all sorts of weird images until her tired eyes closed, but the images that her mind was conjuring up didn't go away.
It was only when her whole body convulsed over a cough, which turned into dry retching that she felt her mind clear up a little more. There was the tangy taste of metal in her mouth and she saw thinly splattered bright red drops on her hands resting on the steering wheel. Passing her tongue along the inside of and over her lips, she couldn't find any major cut that would justify the amount of blood, so she carefully ran her fingers over her face. There were a few more cuts, apart from the big gash along her hairline but most of them had dried up or were in the process of doing so.
Her head reeled. Absentmindedly, she sucked in air through her nose after wiping it with the back of her hand. It was only then that she smelled the pungent gasoline mixed with the syrupy scent of brake fluid and motor oil. Flaring her nostrils and widening her eyes in shock, she tried to make out if there was still smoke coming from her car – which wasn't the case, thankfully.
Even though she was still way too far away to really tell, she just knew that Lindfield had been burnt into oblivion and with it her parents and Emma. The mushroom cloud was funneled over that general direction. The realization was too much for her to take, she just stared onwards blankly, drawing in labored breath after labored breath while silent tears rolled down her cheeks.
She didn't know how much time had passed since she had crashed the car, but it must have been at least half an hour. There was not much she knew about the bomb itself, so the stabilization period of the nuclear blast cloud could have taken anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 minutes, as it depended on bomb size and altitude of the blast above the ground, the type of material swept up by the blast from the ground, and atmospheric conditions like humidity, pressure, and wind speed. She didn't feel like going through mayor calculations here, however.
The mushroom stem and cap of the cloud was still black with fiery eruptions – she assumed by the obvious display of heat that the bomb had been quite loaded and had caused a single, high-yield nuclear detonation – but it wasn't growing anymore in height and seemed to be fraying around the lighter-colored edges, where it was being dispersed by the winds into the surrounding atmosphere, merging slowly with the clouds.
Had she been out for so long? Sure, it had been some sort of merciful that she didn't have to witness the blast itself, yet it didn't give her any comfort at all. All she knew was that she hadn't been able to get to them on time. She most likely would have died, that was for sure, there just hadn't been enough time to get in and out. Not enough time, not enough time, nobody in this had had enough time.
The comm link came back to life and startled her – lost in thoughts – back into reality and back into the pain with the loud static.
"Towra Base, come in!" she heard a way too familiar through the white noise, yet her banged-up head didn't compute. "Towra Base, come in!"
Without much energy and will, and almost automatically, she dropped her hand onto the passenger seat, which was where she thought the comm was, according to where she was hearing the noise from, patting listlessly up and down and around her body.
It took her a few moments to locate the earpiece dangling from the cable around her neck, and then some more to adjust the channel.
"Towra Base, come in!" How many times had she heard It sounded much like Hansen but honestly, she couldn't care any less about who was being so damn insistent. Why was anyone still on the comm? Who still cared about Towra Base? One thought, however, made her wrecked brain stop dead in its tracks. Did the airstrike go wrong? Did the bomb not kill the Kaiju? Did all those people die for absolutely nothing?
"Towra Base, come in!" It was Hansen, she was sure.
"What do you still want from me?" she blurted out weakly into the comm. "Leave me alone!"
"Kylie? Is that you?"
"Damn you, Hansen, you got what you wanted and I can see that you are still alive. Congratulations. Now leave me alone!"
Apparently, he suffered from selective hearing, as he blatantly ignored her request.
"Where are you? Are you alright?"
"You must be joking!" She laughed hysterically, despite the pain. "Alright? No, I AM NOT ALRIGHT!" Her voice had turned shrill. "I…I am not alright…" she added after a pause, sobbing quietly.
"Where are you?"
"What's it to you, anyways?" She was so tired, so ready to just give up and die. All she wanted to do was cease to exist.
"Tell me where you are!" Once again, his voice grew harsh. She knew that he wasn't going to take no for an answer and most likely insist until she was either dead or giving him the details of her whereabouts.
Kylie decided that the latter was most convenient as he might – hopefully – leave her alone after all. And even if he made it to her location to save her like a knight in shining armor – she had to chuckle through the pain – there wasn't much to go back to live for. One way or the other, it didn't really matter.
"I don't know where I am. All I know is that I am stuck in my car, which is stuck in a tree somewhere on A1. I haven't made it out of the Bay yet."
Something changed in his voice. "Are you hurt?"
"I…I guess so…" Suddenly she felt dizzy again, and very very tired. Breathing was hard, too. She coughed hard.
"Just sit tight!"
She coughed. "Funny you mention that…" but couldn't finish the sentence as she grew aware of the fact that she was coughing up blood. The pain in her chest exploded.
"I'm coming for you…"
Kylie didn't hear him anymore. Her head fell backwards against the headrest and she went unconscious one more time.