The night air was cool and moist. Roger and Lois walked from their evening meal as she carried her leftover lasagna in a doggy bag. She hung onto her husband’s arm as he gallantly led the way to the valet podium. Roger felt satisfied. The meal had hit the spot, and all he thought about was getting home to seduce his wife. Roger knew that Lois had one too many glasses of wine, but that was all right. He liked her when she was frisky, and it only added to his desire for her.
“I feel like we’re on our first date,” Lois gently whispered.
“I think someone had too much to drink…my little dynamite,” Roger chuckled.
Lois watched Roger greet the valet driver with his claim ticket. The young man jumped to fetch the SUV as Roger chatted with another valet driver about an exotic Porsche nearby. Lois liked to watch Roger interact with others. She liked how he stood tall and always knew how to direct the conversation. He was a man who lived in the moment and knew how to talk diplomatically. This was a skill, she figured, that must have been fostered from his years of working with big-time business clients.
Roger walked toward Lois, but as his eyes filled with his wife’s glowing face, the roar of his SUV’s gas-guzzling engine consumed his focus. It was followed by the sound of tires screeching. Roger flared up like a mother hearing a stranger abusing her child.
“Whoa! What the hell are you doing?” he shouted at the culprit.
The college-aged man had a look of embarrassment, as he realized that one of his customers had finally caught on to his joyriding. Roger helped Lois into the passenger’s side, and then made his disapproval known to the other man.
“Come on. Where did you learn to drive? This is a fifty thousand dollar vehicle, not some beat-up wagon. And you just drive it around like you don’t give a shit!” he blasted.
The valet driver gave no response. Roger stormed to the driver’s side, purposely giving no tip.
It’s about time someone stood up to these punks, he thought.
Lois could hear his scolding through the sound-deafening material of the SUV. She giggled, too tired to do anything, too tired even to click her seatbelt. All she wanted to do was bask. “Boys will be boys,” she mouthed under her breath.
Roger grabbed the keys from the young man and entered the tranquility of his SUV. His nose received a hint of Lois’ natural scent, which stimulated his receptive olfactory nerve. He immediately calmed down and put himself right back into the placid mood he had felt as he walked out.
“Let’s go home and I’ll make it all better,” Lois murmured.
Her words massaged his auditory nerve and further pushed him into serenity. Roger glanced at his wife; her cleavage kneaded his optic nerve. His worries subsided.
Roger pulled out and drove down the familiar downtown streets. Lois’ tipsiness heightened the mood and made him feel as if he were back in college driving home from an evening basketball game at the Bryce Jordan Center.
Lois began to sing. “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream—come on, Roger.”
Roger laughed.
“Come on, sing,” she playfully instructed.
Roger gave in and joined in the melody. He was a horrible singer, but having an intoxicated audience allowed even the worst singer to shine. They sang in tandem, Lois a few beats ahead of Roger, “…gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream…”
Lois moved closer to Roger and slid her hand on his thigh. Her libido was raging. The fun and games continued as Roger commanded the road. Then, like flipping a light switch, buckets of rainwater attacked his vehicle. Roger immediately reached for the wipers, but the rubber was no match for the flood of water mixed with golf-ball sized hail. He looked up at the sky. While it was relatively clear when they had left, ominous clouds now filled it, stealing the moon away.
Up head, Roger saw the Pleasant Place Bridge through the shield of water. He could make out the fact that four lanes existed, but the water made it nearly impossible to see where the other cars were.
Just follow the yellow line, he kept telling himself, remembering the driving manual he had studied as a teenager.
He couldn’t make out what the body of water was doing down below, but he knew it must have been raging.
Lois continued the song in an attempt to keep up the light-hearted mood, but sweat covered Roger’s brow. He hated driving in blinding weather, and although his SUV gave him a sense of protection, all he could think about was that yellow line.
Lois turned to look behind them, but as she did, she knocked the doggy bag from her lap onto the carpet.
“Watch the rug!” Roger instinctively yelled as he moved his eyes over to the lasagna spill.
As Roger removed his stare from the yellow line, he didn’t see what fate brought the loving couple. Because the moment he looked back at the rain-covered road, he saw an image that would forever change his and his wife’s life.
The image was two blinding headlights, but they weren’t the headlights of a compact car, which would be the contender in a bout with Roger’s champion SUV; they were the headlights of a monstrous, multi-ton tractor-trailer with a fully-weighted load. The truck was hungry as its trailer had jackknifed, which prevented an escape for its prey.
Roger looked up and had a split second of an aura, a moment where chaos met clarity. He could not think, or react, but just be in the moment. After time had bent, the tractor-trailer consumed Roger’s SUV. Like a ragdoll, Lois flew forward and smashed through the front windshield, knocking her immediately unconscious. Her body ejected into the air and soared higher and higher over the concrete bridge. Just like an afflicted bird, however, Lois quickly plummeted toward the screaming water. Her body pierced through the liquid and entered the underwater world. The diamond necklace around her neck broke free and descended toward the unknown.
The tractor-trailer continued to devour more innocent victims on the bridge. A librarian on her way home from work and a soccer mom with her three children were no match for the menacing machine. Flames erupted and metal exploded, rendering the bridge into an impassable roadblock. Cars swerved and nailed the embankment as their drivers took the lesser of two evils. As turmoil blasted everywhere, the truck finally ground to a halt, sending flames of ignited diesel fuel hundreds of feet into the air. Rain blanketed the area, but the fires were too intense even for the liquid from above.
Two bystanders in the oncoming lane had the most horrific view of the show, as they watched the hungry machine eat its victims. What mesmerized them in particular was Lois’ swan dive into the unknown below. Both slammed on their brakes and hustled toward the location of Lois’ descent.
“A woman! I think a woman’s in the water!” one of the two bystanders screamed.
The other bystander, a swimming coach named Bill, didn’t say a word, because he knew that words wouldn’t, they couldn’t, save the fallen woman. Bill dove off the twenty-foot high structure without hesitation. As he soared through the air, he knew the dive was dangerous even for a seasoned high diver, but as his face smashed into the harsh water, adrenaline quickly pushed his fears away.
A crowd watched from the bridge. All they could see was the bobbing water with no sign of Lois or her savior. Seconds seemed liked minutes as the crowd’s eyes tried to search for any sign of life. Some pondered diving in themselves, but they had to give the diver a few more seconds to succeed.
Finally, after what seemed like infinity, Bill emerged from the raging water different from the way he had entered; he had Lois on his back. Bill gasped for oxygen before he embarked on the hundred-yard swim to the south shore. Although a hundred yards would be a brisk morning workout for the veteran swimmer, he knew this would be the most important one hundred yards of not only his life, but also the life of the stranger on his back.
Meanwhile, on the chaotic bridge, Roger still sat inside his SUV. But the moment his head had bashed into the leather-wrapped steering wheel, his mind left his body. Roger was off in a distant universe, a place where
even dreams failed to exist. And if he were given the choice, he would have chosen to be somewhere without thoughts rather than pinned inside his demolished vehicle. As blood trickled down his cut face, his motionless mug lay against the deflated airbag. If he had been somehow awake, the picture of him and Lois, inches from his eyes, would have filled his gaze, but the photograph would have been very different from the one he remembered. It was split down the middle, separating him from his wife.
Fortunately for Roger, more members of the crowd assessed the destroyed vehicles on the bridge. Brazen men, who naturally assumed the responsibility of hero during times of despair, had stepped up during the minutes it took for rescue workers to reach the chaos. Two brothers, who were driving together several cars behind Roger, took notice of his SUV. They ran to his side as the sound of the blaring ambulance sirens grew in strength.
“Sir, can you hear me!?” yelled the older of the brothers.
Roger failed to respond, but that didn’t stop the two men.
“We’ve got to get him out!” the younger brother yelled.
Both men went to work on Roger, grabbing and pulling at his outwardly lifeless body. As they exerted their strength, the rear of the SUV ignited into flames, which traveled under the vehicle toward the twenty-six gallon fuel tank.
“His belt! His seatbelt is still on!” roared the older brother.
Both knew that at any moment the SUV could consume them. However, that didn’t stop their drive, as they knew exactly what had to be done. Both brothers worked in tandem as the elder reached around and pressed the seatbelt release. Miraculously, it still functioned as the click of the metal clasp resonated inside the smashed cabin, bringing music to the brothers’ ears. The older brother unlatched the belt, while the younger gave the first yank. Roger’s body slid out like a baby from a birth canal. Both men focused on moving as far away as possible.
They dragged Roger fifteen feet, and then, in a sudden flash—boom! The vehicle exploded into a fireball of fury. At the same moment, an ambulance driving from the north side took wind of the brothers’ action. The ambulance screeched to a stop nearby as two paramedics burst from the back.
“Is he alright!?” the skinny paramedic yelled.
“I don’t know. We pulled him from that SUV,” replied the older brother as they all glanced at the burning remains of Roger’s SUV.
The other paramedic, the seasoned veteran, checked Roger for signs of life. He positioned his finger on his neck, felt something, but was not sure if the thump was a heartbeat or the vibration of the unstable bridge. He repositioned his finger.
“I have a pulse!” he finally blurted.
“We’ve got to get him to Saint Peters North Hospital,” his colleague shouted.
With perfect timing, the driver of the ambulance, a hefty paramedic, ran toward Roger’s body with a gurney. His job was to drive, something he deeply enjoyed for more than twenty years. But more importantly, he was the strength of the trio—the polished pistons in a well-tuned engine.
At the south-end of the bridge, bystanders feverishly helped the injured as more ambulances raced to the scene. Off on the side, Bill the swimmer finally reached the shore. He was breathing vigorously as his lungs tried to compensate for the extra hundred pounds of nearly dead weight. He finally made it, rolling Lois onto the muddy shore. Luckily, for Bill, he was not alone as a fellow Good Samaritan, an off-duty fireman, followed his breast-stroke from the bridge above. As the fireman neared the rocky path down to the shoreline, he saw a blaring ambulance racing toward him.
“Over here! Hey, over here!” the fireman screamed as he flailed his arms.
The ambulance slammed on its brakes near the pathway down to the beach.
“Hey! Down here!” Bill yelled from his spot as the fireman with a brother-sister team of paramedics hustled toward him.
“She’s in bad shape. She flew off the bridge. I don’t know which car she was in. Oh God, it’s a mess up there,” Bill explained to the three wide-eyed individuals.
“Let’s get her up the hill,” the female paramedic instructed.
Bill was exhausted, and her words seemed to travel right to his overexerted muscles. Fortunately, the random bystander helping was a brawny fireman, who had a fresh set of biceps to aid in hauling Lois’ debilitated body.
They carried her to the top of the hill as Bill took notice of her right arm bobbling like a spraying fire hose. It was fractured—at the least. The contorting arm made him cringe. As they reached the top, the driver, an aged paramedic, awaited with medical gear and a gurney. They placed her on top of the bed, which the rain had soaked, and then began to work on her. Lois’ wet neck gave the female paramedic trouble as she searched for a sign of a beating heart. As the crowd waited without speech, and without thought, the female paramedic finally spoke.
“I feel a faint pulse!” she exclaimed.
The older paramedic positioned a suctioning device on Lois’s mouth and began to squeeze in and out, attempting to pull out the water sloshing around inside her lungs. He worked vigorously, as he knew the right amount of pressure and positioning that would expel the water. Suddenly, water oozed from Lois’ mouth. Her breathing resumed, albeit faint and muffled.
“That’s a good sign, but I don’t know if she’s going to make it,” explained the brother paramedic.
His sister looked at the two men covered in mud from their climb up the hill. “Are you guys okay?”
“Yeah, I’ll be alright,” the fireman responded.
Bill was physically and mentally exhausted. He wanted to explain how he had taken a swan dive face first off the bridge, and then swam a hundred yards carrying the woman. He didn’t, and simply replied, “I’ll live.”
The aged paramedic looked at the wreckage on the bridge blocking traffic and realized that traveling through the air or water was their only option. He yelled to his colleagues, “The bridge is impassable! It’s a drive, but we’ve got to get her to Southern General Hospital!”
“More help is on the way. Thank you, guys,” the female paramedic said to the two saviors.
They watched as the paramedics positioned Lois’ unconscious body into the back of the ambulance. Her sexy dress was torn and a mixture of mud and blood covered her once radiating skin. The older paramedic jumped into the driver’s seat and punched the gas pedal. He pointed the vehicle’s nose back the way it had come.
Police cars, motorists, and ambulances flurried around the war zone on both sides of the burning wreckage. Nothing or no one was protected from the all-encroaching rain, which seemed to intensify with the lights and sirens. There was no way for anyone to use the bridge as it was intended, to cross the raging body of water. Since the only other detour was a fifteen mile drive east to the other bridge, the ambulances were forced to return to one of the city’s two major hospitals—one in the north-end, the other in the south-end. While the turmoil-filled area bustled with activity, two of these ambulances raced at similar speeds, were commanded by similarly experienced drivers, and held a respective member of the Belkin family. The major difference between these two speeding vehicles, however, was not that they held different unconscious occupants; it was the fact they traveled in opposite directions, moving farther and farther apart with each passing second. Just as the scorched photograph inside the remains of Roger’s SUV was torn down the middle, separating the couple, both now faced a much greater separation.
Chapter 5
Clouded Rainbow Page 4