by Dan Alatorre
* * * * *
I had to pull my daughter away at the last second to prevent her from running into the dolly as it sped across the room.
Lifting her to my arms, I swept a strand of blonde hair from her eyes. “You know how we look both ways before crossing a street or parking lot? We have to look both ways before crossing a winery lobby, too!”
She wasn’t amused. I figured she was starting to get fussy for lunch.
As I lowered Sophie to the ground and took her hand, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I shuddered, glancing around the ceiling of an air conditioner vent that must have kicked on.
Sophie tugged my hand, visibly upset.
“Okay, okay. Let me tell Mommy we’re going outside and then we can get something to eat.”
The scowl on the face of the old man with the dolly was a real surprise. I didn’t know who he was, but he seemed to be a very unhappy employee. Unusual, for a customer service area. I don’t remember seeing any unhappy employees at the Napa wineries.
At the counter, Mallory was about to start sampling the wines. I informed her of the pint sized mutiny happening, and she agreed to stay behind and make sure the 2017 wines weren’t adversely affected by the weather or something.
“Okay, I’ll go feed Sophie her lunch. You come out when you’re finished.” I turned to our unhappy princess. “We’ll have a little birthday picnic in the parking lot. Does that sound fun?” I smiled in an attempt to brighten her mood. “It’s nice out. Maybe we’ll open the van doors, sit outside on the cooler, and watch a DVD.”
It didn’t work. Sophie had grown restless, launching into a near tantrum.
I’d better hurry with that picnic.
* * * * *
Mr. Hill wheeled the heavy dolly down the ramp, and stood it next to his grey truck. He placed a hand on it to steady himself while he dug for his keys in his jacket pocket. Pulling them out, he dropped them.
“Damn it!”
A group of young customers, two couples, had just finished their tasting. Early birds, one couple wanted to get to as many wineries—and as many tastings—as they could in a day. The other couple was considering whether to break for lunch. The men smartly decided to let their ladies decide, as they loaded their purchases into the trunk of their sedan.
“Come on, Sherry.” Abigail giggled, tugging on the sleeve of her red-haired friend as they stood by the driver’s side door. “We can eat any time. I wanna get loaded!”
The men laughed. They agreed with Abigail, who had already consumed enough alcohol to no longer whisper quietly. As the men made room among their cramped suitcases for their wines, the ladies continued.
“Aren’t you guys hungry at all?” Sherry asked.
“Sherry-berry.” Abigail wobbled as she spoke. “There’s gotta be a fast food place on the way to the next winery.”
Across the lot, Mr. Hill painfully stacked the delivery cases into his truck. Each one was an aching challenge. His knees burned from squatting to get the dropped keys, but that was the best he could manage using the canes. His back would soon hate him for lifting the cases instead of having a helper do it, but he was too proud and angry to admit to needing help.
The sedan trunk slammed shut. “What did you guys decide?” Steve put his arm around Sherry. Tyler leaned against the trunk as they waited for an answer.
Abigail stuck out her lower lip and pouted. “She’s being no fun.”
“I think we should eat pretty soon.” Sherry sighed. “Or we’ll all be three sheets to the wind like somebody I know.”
Steve nodded, digging his phone out of his pocket. “She’s got a point. Why don’t we check at the map and see what’s around here?”
Across the parking lot, Mr. Hill started the pickup. He glared at the hated hand controls of his truck, grasping them in anger.
“I think there’s a historic church nearby,” Sherry said. “And an old antebellum house . . .”
The others groaned.
Mr. Hill swung an arm over the passenger seat. As he looked backward, the truck engine roared. The wheels screeched and the truck lurched backwards, speeding across the parking lot in reverse. The old man’s knuckles turned white as he clung desperately to the hand controls.
At the squeal of the tires, Sherry glanced at the gray truck that sped towards them. Its tail lights never lit up to indicate that it was slowing down. Instead it came faster. Her eyes widened as she opened her mouth to scream.
Panicking, Mr. Hill gripped the controls even tighter. The truck accelerated faster.
The look on Sherry’s face made Tyler turn around. The tailgate of the truck was coming right at him. He flinched and turned away. Tires still screeching, the truck smashed full speed into the sedan. Glass exploded everywhere. The impact slammed Steve into the van in the next parking space and heaved Sherry into the air. She was like a matador being thrown by a raging bull in one of those “Animals Gone Crazy” videos.
Eyes bulging, Hill still gripped the accelerator, shouting as he bounced around the cab of his pickup. The engine raced as the truck forced its way past its victims and into the small grassy patch in front of the vineyard. The truck had barely slowed down on impact. It plowed backwards, churning dirt into the air, as it sped toward the vineyard. Engine whining, it smashed through vines and fences and irrigation posts, revving higher as it went, until it finally got tangled up in enough debris to stall out.
It was as though its driver had maniacally intended to kill everyone present.
Chapter 6
“Hey.”
One simple word could not have meant more to any other person in their entire lives.
Mallory turned to the voice and saw me, her smiling husband, holding our daughter in my arms. She ran over and grabbed us both, hugging the two of us tighter than she ever had before. “Oh, thank God!”
I’d been smiling upon seeing my wife. I was now concerned. “What’s the matter?”
“I didn’t know it wasn’t you.” Mallory glanced at me and then out to the parking lot. “I mean, I thought it was you, the two of you, out there.” Tears welled in her eyes. She buried her face in my chest. “I didn’t know you two were okay.”
I put my arms around my wife as she continued to squeeze me and our daughter. In the winery doorway, the three of us embraced, a family reunited after only minutes, but to Mallory it must have seemed like hours. I’d never seen her like this.
“I heard somebody yell for an ambulance and when I got to the window I saw somebody laying on the ground and . . .” The words caught in her throat. “Her dress was the same color as Sophie’s.”
“It’s okay.” I rubbed her back, feeling the tension draining out of it. “We’re okay.”
She kept hugging us. “I’ve never been so scared!”
I gazed out the doorway at the carnage. The crowd around the victims obscured almost everything except the blood. Small pools of it streamed across the lot to the storm drain. It was different from the blood they show in movies. That, and the damage to the cars in the parking lot, did a lot to fuel my wife’s impression that she’d just lost her family.
What a scene. The entire sedan was smashed like a soda can. The trunk was crumpled but the car had been forced around backwards so now the hood faced the winery and the trunk faced the vineyards. Our rental van was demolished. The side nearest the sedan was almost completely torn away.
Knowing that and feeling it are two different things. I was so concerned about keeping Sophie from seeing it, I didn’t react at all to what I’d see—and what had almost happened to us. Had we been sitting there for our picnic, we would have been killed.
Heaving against my chest and covering our daughter in kisses, Mallory thought we had been. But it didn’t register with me. Not yet.
I suppose I never felt we had been in any danger. Sophie and I never made it to the van. A distraction—a little temper tantrum—had slowed us long enough to avoid being victims of the wreck, but I had witnessed all the sho
cking carnage. I pulled open the winery door and the gray pickup truck squealed its wheels. It launched across the parking lot like a rocket, smashing right into the sedan—and the people. I saw it all and was able to turn Sophie away so she didn’t see any of it.
“I heard somebody yell for an ambulance.” Mallory shuddered. Holding our daughter, she paced back and forth in the entryway as people rushed in and out to help attend to victims—or to get a better view of the macabre scene still unfolding outside.
“That was me,” I said, trying to comfort her. “I was the guy you heard shouting.”
Mallory gazed up at me, her mouth open. She wiped her eyes, smearing mascara onto her cheeks.
“I saw the whole thing from right here. I didn’t want to go out and help because I didn’t want . . .” I paused and nodded at our daughter, lowering my voice. “I didn’t want this one to see that lady and all the, you know. B-L-O-O-D.”
Certain the young woman had been killed, I didn’t want our child to witness that first hand—or hear the screams from her friend, the shouts from the volunteers . . .
“I’m so glad you’re both safe.” Mallory hugged and kissed us both. She held back her emotions as best as she could. To go from terror to joy was a sudden turn, and no one could blame her for crying a little in the process.
Volunteers rushed in and out, getting towels and water for the victims’ wounds. We needed to move.
I scanned the winery. “Why don’t we . . . why don’t you take Sophie back into the lobby. I’ll go see if I can help outside.”
Mallory took a deep breath and nodded, appearing happy to get away from what she could see in the parking lot.
The police would probably want a statement from an eye witness when they arrived. I stepped out the door and made a slow circle around the crowd, thinking about ways I could help but not really wanting to see the dead woman or her friends’ injuries. With my hands in my pockets, I crept toward the wreckage that had been a peaceful parking lot moments before.
The young lady was on her back, surrounded by her friends and the volunteers, her yellow dress stained with blood. Several of the winery’s employees were administering makeshift bandages to the victims, using towels and cleaning cloths. The way the employees spoke to the victims was the way we’d been trained to when I was a life guard in high school. Keep them talking, keep telling them they’re okay, and do it in reassuring tones.
A man wearing a volunteer firefighter t-shirt kneeled closest to her. A barrel-chested man and a few other customers had jumped right into action when they heard me call for help. They seemed to know what they were doing, too. Calm voices. Several asked each other for a towel or water, addressing each other by name.
I hoped the girl had survived. It was incredible, to see her tossed into the air like a doll, then come crashing down between the two cars as they smashed together. I was sure there was no way she could have survived, and the streams of blood indicated I was right. With all the damage to the vehicles, and the way the truck plowed right into the people, it was difficult to think any of them had survived.
But they had.
Her friends had all miraculously escaped much harm. Bruises and a black eye for the one; a few scratches for the others. They stood vigil over their injured friend in the yellow dress as the volunteer firemen steered her away from going into shock and tried to keep her conscious.
She should be dead. Ironic, but she has no idea how lucky she is today. She won’t think that, but it’s true.
There was no way anybody should have survived it.
That’s when the realization struck me. It came with such blinding force that I blinked, unable to breathe.
This is how close you just came to getting killed, yourself. To having your insides splattered all over the side of the van.
I would have been sitting right between the cars, on the cooler, like we had planned . . .
Sophie probably would have been on my lap.
That made the air rush out of me. I put my hand out, knocking into some people, staggering to find a solid place to hold myself up. I leaned against one of the other cars in the lot, trying not to think about the possibilities, but they came rushing into my head anyway.
I turned away, but the image was already imprinted on my memory. Sophie would have been killed. My sweet little girl, dead.
Even if an adult could survive, could a child? Being smashed by a truck at full speed? They worry about kids becoming fatalities in twenty mile per hour crashes! There was no way she would have made it.
I thought about our daughter being thrown into the air the way the young woman had been. The image caused an awful blackness to swell inside me. I wiped my eyes and forced myself to refocus. There might be help I could offer. Inbound cars full of customers, not aware of the accident that had just occurred, were trying to pull into the parking lot.
Where was the ambulance?
Employees directed traffic. Chairs were brought out to block the wreck area. I walked to the parking lot entrance to direct any new arrivals to the rear lot.
But I couldn’t help surveying the damage again.
The gray truck was buried a hundred yards into the vineyard. The sedan was crushed and turned around. Our rental van was demolished on one side. Glass was everywhere. Huge black tire marks showed the path the truck had taken, directly from its handicap spot to the sedan, then it had plowed up huge chunks of grass and dirt all the way to its resting place deep among the vines. A winery worker had gone over to help the driver.
Good idea. That old guy was probably having a heart attack when he did all this, and if he didn’t have one then, he might have one now.
The worker opened the truck door and reached inside. The driver, clad in drab clothes, came out of the vehicle. He fumbled a bit as he exited the pickup. Probably a concussion.
Steadying the old man, the employee produced two canes from the truck bed. The driver began to walk with them, hobbling toward the parking lot. He shrugged off the worker, batting at him with one of the canes.
That was odd. The guy was only trying to help.
It was a curious moment, but I didn’t give it a second thought. Sirens in the distance indicated help was finally on the way.
I returned to the tasting room to give Mallory an update. She had commandeered a t-shirt display table as her command post and was already working on getting a replacement rental van. Whether she was working hard at distracting herself or already over the excitement, she looked busy.
“Sophie’s getting fussy.” Using the tasting room’s fireplace hearth for a seat, Mallory held her cell phone to her ear and bounced our daughter on her knee. “Why don’t you see if any of the stuff in the car is okay? The cooler and the snacks. Maybe we can get her something to eat.”
The winery only sold exotic cheeses and bottled water, and maybe some wine crackers. Our picky girl wouldn’t eat any of that.
“Okay.” I walked back out to the van.
I stepped around the glass and the blood soaked paper towels that had been discarded by paramedics. Somehow, getting into the van at this moment, with the young lady lying right there on the other side, it seemed . . . rude. While paramedics tended to her wounds, I was trying to get a snack.
I tried to make it less uncomfortable on myself by going to the driver’s side. As if I could have gotten into the passenger side anyway.
Opening the door shocked me.
The van’s interior was pristine. The wreckage to the outside was completely masked on the inside. There were broken windows but no bits of glass on the seats. No smashed bottles of wine leaking from the many cases stacked by the suitcases. Nothing really out of place.
Outside, chaos, demolished metal and debris. Bloody victims groaning as emergency workers tended to them.
Inside, quiet and calm. The car was peaceful and . . . a little stuffy.
I reached in and grabbed the cooler. As a passing thought, I popped open the glove compartment and pulled out the rent
al contract paperwork. We’d be needing it.
As I stepped back and went to shut the door, it pushed back. It wouldn’t close. I stared at it for a moment. The impact of the crash must have twisted the support frame. I shook my head. How amazing that the wreck could bend the sturdy steel frame and not break a single glass wine bot—
A wave of nausea hit me. My head became uncomfortably warm, almost dizzy, and a queasy feeling swept through my gut. I put my hand on the side of the vehicle to steady myself, drawing deep breaths. The air outside was cool but in my nose and throat it felt stuffy, like the inside of the van a moment ago. I swallowed hard. All the excitement must have finally been getting to me. A delayed reaction.
“Excuse me.” A tall young man in a dark blue police uniform approached me.
I righted myself, taking another deep breath. “Yes, officer?”
He glanced at the van. “Is this your vehicle?”
“Yeah.” I looked it over. “What’s left of it.”
The queasiness wouldn’t leave. For a second, I thought I might throw up right in front of the officer. I swallowed again, trying to force back the uneasy feeling.
“Are you okay, sir?”
I nodded. “I am. A little motion sickness. It’ll pass.” His name badge read SGT. TAGGART.
He watched me for a moment, then took out a notepad. “Did you see what happened?”
“Actually, I did.” Putting a fist to my lips like I was going to cough, I tried to assess whether the sick feeling was growing or passing. It did neither. Maybe talking would help. I pointed to the winery building. “I was in the doorway, coming out into the parking lot. I saw the whole thing.”
Sergeant Taggart peered over my shoulder. Behind him, the drab old man used his two canes to slowly work his way back toward main building. The winery worker trailed a few steps behind him.
“We’re going to need you to make a statement. Would you mind?”
“No problem.”
“It’s going to be a few minutes since we have the situation with the other people . . .”