One to Go (2 page)

He shook the cobwebs from his head, but the smoke remained static, no doubt an optical illusion caused by the shattered safety glass.

His eyes returned to the passenger seat. My God, what if he'd been on time and picked up Janie? He would've packed three of the girls into the backseat, and strapped Janie into the front bucket. Janie would be dead, maybe the others as well.

He wrenched his head around, and saw the green minivan, teetering on two wheels, about to flip into the river.

Janie
.

He struggled to get out of the car, but the driver's side door was jammed shut. Not surprisingly, the electric window wouldn't move.

The seat belt buckle had slipped around so he was half sitting on it. He pushed the release button. Jammed.

Wiggling his hips against the belt, he gasped as stabbing pain shot across his lower back and down his left leg. The belt loosened. The bolts that fastened the belt bracket to the floor had been partially dislodged. He grabbed the belt at the point nearest the bracket and, with a quick glance across the road at the teetering minivan, pulled, using not only his arms and shoulders, but his whole body. His cry of pain mixed with triumph as the bracket popped loose. The smell of smoke strengthened. He twisted under and out of the seat belt.

He kicked out the windshield, and immediately pain fired from his hip and shot down his left leg, grabbing the breath from his lungs.

Ignoring the cuts to his arms from the broken glass, he dragged his body through the opening, then slid headfirst down the side of the car to the pavement and crawled to his feet.

Focusing only on the teetering minivan, he staggered to the center line. In the back of his mind, he wondered why he wasn't hearing the sound of approaching sirens. Then he realized he wasn't hearing anything. Had the impact from the collision caused hearing loss? Would it be permanent?

No time for that, he had to get to his daughter. The smell of smoke and burning rubber was nearly suffocating. He saw for the first time that smoke and flames rose from the minivan's engine. He had to pull her out before the gas tank caught on fire.

But, again, the flames weren't moving.

He turned back to the pickup. The smoke appeared to be frozen in the air.

He spun completely around. None of the other cars on the bridge moved. A few tourists who'd been strolling along the sidewalk seemed frozen in time. One woman walking a black poodle was suspended just as she was about to take a step. She should be falling over as her center of gravity hovered out and away from the single foot on the ground.

Tom made his way across the road to the minivan. Shouldn't it be tipping over? He saw Janie's face snug up against the rear window. Her mouth gaped open wide, her palms pressed against the glass. Her body leaned toward the pavement, but didn't fall. She wasn't moving, not a twitch.

She didn't frigging move!

He saw Angie and two other girls flipped and turned inside—all of them suspended in midair.

For a moment he stared into Janie's eyes. An unusual color of blue ice, he'd always been secretly proud when someone would tell her, “Oh, you've got your father's eyes.” And while those eyes didn't move, he couldn't shake the feeling she could see him.

He tried to pry open the rear door. Didn't budge.

Maybe if he broke the glass of the rear window. He shuffled as fast as he could back to the overturned pickup to check for tools. His back spasmed as he crouched down, and he had to pause to catch his breath. The driver, a teenage boy, was upside down and had not been wearing his seat belt. The boy's unseeing eyes stared at Tom from his partially severed head. Blood soaked the bench seat and everything inside the cab. Tom struggled to force down the bile rising in his throat as he searched for a hammer or some other tool he could use to bash in the Dodge's rear window. Nothing.

He glanced back at the teetering van. There were other cars on the bridge. Somebody's got to have a hammer. He gasped from the pain in his back and leg as he rose to his feet. Looking east toward the Memorial, he spotted another truck, a white van with
Welch Plumbing
painted on the side, and hobbled toward it.

As he passed the red pickup's undercarriage, he reached out and moved his hand through the rising smoke—
except it wasn't rising
. He felt nothing.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement from the far eastern end of the bridge.

Two people jogged toward him.

As they got closer, he could make out that one was female. Ignoring the pain, he ran/shuffled toward the couple, waving his arms frantically in the air.

“Help! Help!”

The man and woman each smiled and waved back, continuing their easy pace. They must not have heard him.

“
Help! Accident!
”

Tom reached them near the center point of the bridge. They were young, tan, good looking in a clean, wholesome way. Both blond with ice-blue eyes. Not twins, but enough of a resemblance they easily could be brother and sister. With crisp white shorts and matching lime-green t-shirts, they resembled models from an Abercrombie & Fitch or J.Crew ad out for an easy jog on a warm, late September morning. And they appeared wholly oblivious to the scene surrounding them.

“Do you have a phone?” Tom shouted.

The male reached into his pocket, retrieved a cell phone, and showed it to him.

“Call 911! Hurry, my daughter—!”

“That's not really necessary, Tom,” the man responded with a gleaming smile.

“You already called? Great. Look, my daughter and a bunch of other kids are in that green van. You got to help me get the door open.” He shuffled toward the van. “We have to be careful, 'cause if the van tips over—wait, how did you know my name?” He stopped
and turned back to the couple. It hit him—his surroundings frozen in a moment of time, two beautiful people greeting him.

Holy shit. He was dead
.

“You're not dead, Tom,” said the girl.

“How do you know what I'm thinking?”

They both responded with a wide grin.

“C'mon, we have to get the girls out of the van now.” Doing his best to ignore the pain, he shuffled as fast as he could toward the minivan, expecting them to follow.

When he'd gone about thirty feet, he turned back. They hadn't moved.

Then in a sliver of a second, they were standing immediately in front of him.

“Who
are
you?”

“I'm Chad, and this is Britney. Pleasure to meet you, Tom.” They each offered their hands.

Tom assumed there was a logical explanation for the bizarre behavior of these two preppy jerks, but he didn't have time to focus on it. He had to get Janie out of the Dodge. He ignored their extended hands, and ran the best he could to the minivan.

When he arrived, nothing had changed. The vehicle remained teetering on two wheels, and Janie's expression was still frozen. She hadn't moved a muscle.

He heard the girl—Britney?—directly behind him. “It's kind've weird, don't you think?”

He looked back. They both stood there, still with their hands extended. “I mean, the frozen-in-time thing. Spooky.”

“I agree,” said Chad, never losing his smile. “Way spooky.”

Who the hell were these people? “I don't know what's going on, but if you can do anything, please help me get her out of there.”

“As a matter of fact, Tom, we can help,” said Chad.

“Absolutely,” added Britney.

Chad wrapped a comforting arm around Tom's shoulder, and gently turned him so they were both facing the minivan. “I'm sure
you'd agree that life's about making decisions. Trivial decisions—what am I going to wear today? What am I having for breakfast? And consequential decisions—the choice of a career, the selection of a spouse. Sometimes we're forced to make life or death decisions. Can you think of an example of a life or death decision, Tom?”

“Please, just help—”

“Try, Tom.”

“I don't know, pulling the plug on a loved one.”

“Excellent,” said Britney. “You get an
A-
plus.”

Chad waved his arm in front of the wreckage. “See, Tom, you have a life or death decision to make right now.”

“Actually, it's a life or
deaths
decision,” said Britney.

“You're right,” said Chad, chuckling. “I stand corrected. A life or
deaths
decision.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” He looked over at the Lexus, half expecting to see his own body still in the cab. Or, despite what they'd said, maybe he really
was
dead. But if he was dead, where was he? And why would stabbing pain be shooting from the small of his back down his leg?”

There can be two different outcomes here,” said Chad, gesturing to the wreckage. “Here's choice
A
.”

He heard a
whirring
sound, like an old-time tape recorder rewinding. Suddenly, everything moved. Backward. Rewinding to seconds before the collision.

Tom couldn't believe his eyes. He saw the green minivan with Rosie driving eastbound on the bridge, behind the red pickup. He could make out the driver now—good-looking kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen—talking on his cell phone. He saw his Lexus approaching the other two vehicles, and he was driving. But that was impossible, because he was standing on the sidewalk.

He looked closer.
He was driving
.

“Kind've cool,” said Britney.

Tom couldn't pull his eyes away. He saw himself look down to check Gayle's text.

“You shouldn't text and drive,” said Chad.

“Driving distractions kill,” said Britney.

He heard the honking horns and screeching tires. He smelled the burnt rubber. He watched, transfixed, as the Lexus spun out of control toward the minivan and the red truck.

Except there was no collision.

Rosie braked hard, the minivan screeched to a stop, allowing Tom's Lexus to spin out in front of her. The Lexus careened up over the curb, missing the light post by a whisker, then returned to the road. The red truck continued on its way. Tom could see Rosie through the window giving the Lexus driver—him—the finger. Obviously, she didn't get a good look at him and didn't recognize the car. She slowly pulled out again and headed east toward DC.

As the minivan passed, Tom could see Janie and the other girls giggling at Rosie's obscene gesture.

He waved both of his arms frantically. “
Janie!
”

He knew she couldn't hear him, but he was so excited to see her alive and safe he didn't care. He turned back to Chad.

“If this is a dream, I want to wake up now.”

Chad ignored him.

Again, he heard the whirring sound, and the scene returned to where it had been moments earlier—frozen in time with an overturned pickup, a Lexus wrapped around a light post, and his daughter caught in mid-scream inside a green minivan hovering over the edge of a bridge on two wheels.

“And this is option
B
,” said Chad. He swept his arm over the wreckage. This time the scene rewound just a few seconds.

Immediately the now familiar jumble of sights, sounds, and smells confronted Tom: a piercing scream from the woman with the poodle; the screech of brakes and blaring horns from other cars as they swerved to avoid crashing into the pickup; the acrid smell of smoke and burnt rubber.

He whipped his head back to the minivan. The flames from
the engine were moving now. They'd caught on the gas dribbling from the fuel tank, singeing the green paint below the filler cap.

God, no!

The flames moved up the side of the van toward the filler pipe.

And the van slowly tipped toward the river.

“Janie!”

As Tom ran toward the van, he saw her face and hands still pressed tight against the glass, a look of stark terror on her face. He got close enough to see her mouth, “
Daddy!
”

Then, as if in slow motion, the van flipped over the railing and dropped upside down, crashing into the Potomac.

The jarring slap of the van hitting the water lasted only a split second before being supplanted by the huge
boom
of the minivan exploding into flames. The blast shot back a fireball rising above the level of the bridge, causing Tom to involuntarily jump back.

“
NOOO!
”

Tom ignored the sparks and bits of debris raining down on the bridge, and rushed to the railing. Below, he saw the vehicle totally consumed by flames. He thought he heard a faint cry for help rising from the fire.
Janie's voice?
Did he imagine it? Was he imagining the whole nightmare scene?

He heard shrieks, shouts, and the faint wail of an approaching siren. He had to get down there. Now.

He turned to see Chad and Britney standing calmly in the middle of the road as the chaos swirled around them.

“
Help me!
”

In a split second, they both stood in front of him. “Sorry, Tom, she's gone,” said Chad.

“Afraid she's burnt to a crisp,” said Britney, an expression of deep sympathy on her face. “And, sadly, it was painful.”

“Very painful,” added Chad in a comforting tone.

Tom balled his fist and swung as hard as he could at Chad's jaw. His fist passed through Chad's smiling face as if it weren't there, and the force of his swing knocked him to the pavement.

When he looked up, he heard the
whirring
sound, and the scene snapped back a few seconds. The minivan was back on the bridge, teetering on two wheels, frozen in time.

Chad offered a hand. Tom ignored it and struggled to his feet. He couldn't keep his voice from quivering. “Who
are
you?”

“We're the folks who are going to give you a chance to save your daughter,” Chad responded.