I had been waiting for the slimmest of chances to escape. Even though the car was still moving, I saw the bushes beside the road, instead of that forbidding wall. I threw open my door and fell out, rolling onto the spiky plants beside the asphalt. I had expected it would hurt but I hadn’t anticipated how much. I felt stones cutting into me and the breath knocked out of me as I hit the ground and rolled. I came cannoning into the bushes, which yielded under my weight, then I felt myself sliding down into nothingness. I grabbed wildly as branches slipped past me, scratching at my arms and face. Somehow my hands managed to hold on to a small branch and I came to a halt, half suspended, half dangling out over the most horrendous of cliff faces.

My position was so precarious I wasn’t sure what to do next. Leafy branches were in my face. Some kind of stump was sticking into my back, holding me out from the cliff, as my hands clutched at a branch that was bending with my weight. When I looked down all I could see were rocks, hundreds of feet below. At any second I expected to feel the thud of a bullet into me, or to feel the slender branch finally yield and crack beneath my sweaty fingers. Instead I heard a great boom far off, then I spotted a fireball somewhere below me. Fire raced up the cliff, consuming the scrub it met. As it came upward it spread. Through the leaves and twigs below me I could see orange flames licking their way out toward me, like a hungry dragon devouring everything in its path.