Shaw thought for a minute. “Okay. We’ve got one shot at this. Just one. If we get out we get out together. If we go down, well…”
“Trust me, I get the picture. What’s the plan?”
“Basically a thousand-to-one shot.”
“Okay, I’m already loving it,” she said sarcastically.
“As soon as I get the loop over that branch, you grab on to me like you’ve never held on to anything in your life. Got it?”
Katie’s breaths were coming quickly now as the car started to tilt forward even more. “We’re going over, aren’t we?”
“Katie, did you hear me?”
“Yes, yes I did. Grab on to you, never let go. Got it.”
“But wait until I get the loop over the branch.”
“And you’re going to do all that in the millisecond you’ll have before we fall to our deaths? Pull us to safety using a belt I bought at the Gap for ten bucks?”
“Katie, don’t go hysterical on me. I know you’ve been in plenty of tight places before. This is just one more of them.”
She gazed fearfully out the windshield and then looked away. “Okay.”
Shaw eased sideways and eyed the branch trying to convince himself that it would not necessarily be a miracle if what he was about to do worked. It would actually constitute more than a miracle, he realized. It would take divine intervention plus luck, plus some unknown element of cosmic wizardry.
“You ready?” he said.
Katie was breathing so hard she sounded like she was about to deadlift a ton of iron as she prepared herself to escape a two-thousand-pound car as it fell away from them at speed. She looked at the window opening. It seemed about three inches in diameter. They were never going to make it. I can do this, she said to herself. I can do this. Oh please God let me do this.
Shaw tossed the loop. It missed.
Katie cried out, “Maybe I can try it from back here.” She hit the window button and the panel of glass slid down.
And then the car suddenly snaked forward.
“Oh shit!” Katie said.
“Hold on!” Shaw called out.
“It’s going, Shaw. It’s going over. Oh my God!”
The car was indeed going and there was nothing between it, them, and a hundred tons of oak. From where he was sitting Shaw could no longer even reach the branch with his belt rope.
“Shaw!” Katie screamed, gripping the seat with all her strength as the front of the car shot downward and the rear lifted up into the air like the Titanic about to take the final plunge.
Shaw swore, flipped backward over the seat, turned in mid-roll, and let the belt lasso fly out Katie’s window.
It somehow snagged the branch and Shaw pulled it tight.
Miracles did, it seemed, happen.
The car’s momentum had pulled Shaw, who was holding on to the belt with both hands, halfway out of the window.
“Katie, grab hold of my legs. Now!”
He felt her grip his legs. The car was going all the way, no stopping it now.
Shaw slid neatly out of the window but then something felt wrong.