A woman in a blue dress riding a bike had come out from a side road, completely oblivious to the Porsche bearing down on her. Heather had a momentary feeling of weightlessness. It wasn’t that the car had lifted off the ground or anything like that; the Porsche SUV was totally safe. This feeling was from another branch of physics entirely. This was the feeling that her life had gone into one of those multiverses Tom was always going on about. In one universe Tom had called the car-rental place five minutes earlier and they’d gotten the Porsche with the radar and the accident-avoidance system. In this universe Heather yelled “Tom!” as the front of the SUV completely enveloped the woman on the bicycle.
5
The disc brakes were powerful but the Porsche had been going too fast and it had too much momentum.
“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Tom cried as the Porsche plowed over the bicycle with a sickening thud. They scraped and slid along the ground for twenty yards before skidding into a drainage ditch. The airbags inflated and Heather was jolted back by her seat belt. They came to a stop as the wheels spun and the engine died.
Heather opened her eyes.
The world was tilted thirty degrees from the horizontal. Tall white grass on either side of the road. The woman and the bicycle were nowhere to be seen. The airbag was slowly deflating in front of her.
Heather’s neck was wrenched and she had dug the nails of her left hand into her wrist. Her dad and mom had taught her about self-triage. She inventoried herself for bleeding or broken bones but she knew she was basically OK. She disengaged the seat belt and turned around to look at the kids.
The side airbags in the back seat had inflated and deflated. Olivia was dazed but looked OK. Owen had cut his cheek on his seat belt.
“Are you OK, Owen?” she asked.
His eyes found hers and he nodded.
“Say it. Tell me if you’re OK or not.”
“I’m OK,” he said.
“Good. Olivia, are you OK?”
Olivia nodded. “I think so. What happened?”
“Did we hit something?” Owen asked.
Heather looked at Tom. His airbag was wedging him into his seat. His side of the car had entered the ditch, and his body was angled away from her.
“Tom? Tom! Are you hurt?” she asked.
“What? No…not…hurt. Head…window.” He groaned.
“Let me see.”
He had banged his head against the window and had a scrape on his forehead; he was clearly stunned, perhaps concussed.
For the past six months Tom had done everything for her. Opened doors, paid bills, argued with waiters, cleared her credit card debt, done almost all of the driving, and certainly handled all the emergencies. But he would need a few minutes to recover and the kids couldn’t— She would have to—
“I’ll get out,” she said. “Kids, I want both of you to stay in the car for now. Both of you take your seat belts off. Olivia, help your brother.”
Heather’s shoulder ached where the seat belt had smacked into her. She pushed aside the deflated airbag and found the handle to open the door. Her fingers tingled and her arm felt like rubber. She pushed the door and nothing happened. She pushed harder and still nothing. She kicked the bastard and it opened.
The heat hit her like a wave.
She’d forgotten the heat. The AC must have really been cranking.
She got out of the car and fell onto the road. Her hands burned on the asphalt.
Getting up, she took a breath and then hobbled around to the front of the SUV. The woman was not there. A faint hope coursed through her. She scanned the grass on either side of the road. It was tempting to think that Tom had somehow avoided the woman but Heather knew that was not the case. She had felt the crump of the bike under the tires.
She got down on one knee and looked beneath the SUV, and there was the bicycle, under the back left wheel. She hurried back behind the car and saw the woman’s body, horribly mangled, another ten feet down the road.
She ran and knelt beside her. “Are you…oh my God.”
Both of her legs were twisted underneath her in an unnatural position that legs could not possibly go. She was bleeding through the blue dress. Heather lifted the dress and saw a massive scrape across her chest but no obvious penetrating wound. She did not appear to be breathing.
“Oh my God, I am so sorry! Oh no, I am so, so sorry. You poor…we didn’t see…oh my God…”
Blood was oozing from her nose and mouth.
She needed a doctor. “Tom! Get out here!”
Heather put her hand on the woman’s neck and counted off ten seconds, but there was no trace of a pulse. She gently tilted the woman’s head back, put two fingers in her mouth, and cleared it of blood and broken teeth and a hunk of flesh.