Promise You'll Stay || Ziam ||

•[10]•

I know all of you hate me xD

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Zayn leaned his head against the car window, watching the scenery zip by with his blurred vision, wispy strands of white fog, and heavy gray storm clouds up above. His mother was driving, his dad in the passenger seat, while he was in the back. No one spoke of what happened back at the stadium. No one spoke of how broken Zayn felt, no one really spoke anything at all, because no one expected it to happen. The radio was playing softly; 'Why by Secondhand Serenade' came on. It fit Zayn's situation so perfectly. It felt like some sort of weird coincidence. Zayn concentrated on the music, imagined himself singing feeling grateful to have some type of closure. He closed his eyes.

You wouldn't expect the radio to work afterward. But it did.

The car was eviscerated. The impact of a four-ton pickup truck going straight into the driver's side had the impact of an atom bomb. It tore off the doors, sent the front-side straight through the driver's window. It ripped the engine apart as if it were no stronger than a spider's web. It ignited bits of the gas tank, so that tiny flames lap at the wet road.

And there was so much noise. A combination of grinding, a chorus of popping, an array of exploding and finally, the sad clapping of the metal. Then all of a sudden it went quite, except for the soft murmur of 'Why' still playing on the radio.

At first Zayn thought everything was fine, he was standing on the side of the road, he looked down, the white shirt, the black jeans and the converse he put on earlier were untouched. And then there was the fact that he was standing there, feeling absolutely no pain. He tried having a better look at the car. It wasn't even a car anymore. It was a metal skeleton, without seats, no passengers. This meant that his family must have been thrown out of the car like himself. He brushed off his hands onto his jeans and walked to the other side of the road to find them.

He found his mom first. There was almost no blood on her, but her lips were already blue and the whites of her eyes were completely red, like a ghost from a low budget monster movie. She seemed unreal. Zayn felt numb, he couldn't feel anything. He spun around; he needed to find his dad.

He ran back towards where he came from. He saw a hand sticking out from a bush. "Dad! I'm right here!" he called. "Reach up! I'll pull you out!" But when he came closer, he saw the metal glint of a silver bracelet with guitar charms on it. Liam had given it to him on his seventeenth birthday. It was his bracelet. He was wearing it that morning. He looked down at his wrist, he's still wearing it.

He edged closer and then he knew, it wasn't his dad lying there, it was him. The blood from his chest had seeped through his white shirt and jeans onto the virgin snow. His eyes are closed; his raven hair is wet and rusty from the blood.

He spun away, this wasn't right, this could not have been happening. He must have fallen asleep in the car. "Please stop. Stop it. Please wake up!" He screamed into the chilly air. It's cold. His breath should have smoked but it didn't. He stared down at his wrist, the one that looked fine, untouched by blood. He pinched it as hard as he could.

He didn't feel a thing.

Someone, Harry, ran straight past Zayn, towards Zayn's lifeless body. "Zayn!" He breathlessly called out, his voice crocked. Harry bent down, and then called 911, immediately calling someone else afterwards. The night was so silent that Zayn heard a faint "oh my god" come out of Harry's phone. Harry had said Zayn got in an accident, right outside the café Harry worked at. What Zayn didn't understand was that why couldn't harry see him? Was he dead?

It wasn't long after that the sirens came.

***

The paramedics were there now. Zayn could see the commotion. They were bagging his mother up. One of them was talking to a younger one, who didn't look a day above eighteen. The older one explained to the rookie that Zayn's mother had been hit first, and killed instantly, explaining the lack of blood. "Immediate cardiac arrest," he said. "When your heart can't pump blood, you don't really bleed. You seep."

Zayn couldn't think about that, about his mother seeping. So instead he thought about how fitting it was that she was hit first, that she had been the one to buffer Zayn from the blow. It wasn't her choice obviously, but it was her way.

But was he dead? The he who was lying on the edge of the road, his leg hanging down, was surrounded by a team of men and women who were performing frantic ablutions over him, and plugging his veins with he did not know what. He should be in agony. Yet He wasn't even crying, even though he knew something unthinkable had happened to his family. Which made him think he was dead.

Well, Was he?