The Meridians(58)

"It exploded," Scott guessed. Hence the shrapnel that had nearly perforated his head but had instead settled only for adding an extra hole to his ear.

Lynette nodded. "The driver was thrown free before it happened," she said, and pointed at a spot about twenty feet away from the truck, where a small group of onlookers was standing around a body covered in someone's jacket and surrounded by a widening pool of blood.

Scott cursed and began walking toward the body on the pavement.

"Scott, where are you going?" shouted Lynette.

"You don't just assume someone's dead," said Scott over his shoulder. "You start CPR no matter what, then wait until the paramedics come to take over or until a doctor pronounces the person dead."

"Scott, wait!" she shouted, and hurried after him until she could grab his arm. The touch arrested his forward motion as quickly and effectively as a brick wall could have done. "There's no reviving the poor man," she said quietly.

"Why? Has a doctor seen him?" asked Scott.

"No," she said. "And neither have I. But from what I understand, it's hard to do CPR on someone whose head isn't attached anymore."

Scott looked at the body and realized that the blood surrounding it was definitely too much to lose and have any hope of survival. Not only that, but the body was strangely short. As though...

He shuddered and turned away from the grisly scene. "Was there anyone else in the truck?" he asked.

Lynette nodded. "That's who the ambulance is for. He's unconscious, breathing, but burnt pretty badly from what Gil said."

"Gil saw?" asked Scott.

Lynette nodded. "He was at the car as soon as the smoke cleared."

"Just like Gil," answered Scott. "What about the people in the Volvo?" Though he knew even as he asked what the answer had to be: no one could survive a crash like that: the monster truck had completely collapsed the roof of the Volvo into the passenger area of the car. No survival was possible in such a situation.

But Lynette surprised him. "Oh, Scott," she said. "It was amazing. That's Ruth's car."

"Ruth?"

"The bigoted bitch."

"Oh, right." He eyed the Volvo again. "Well I guess she's actually a bigoted lucky bitch," he said with a grim chuckle.

"Lucky nothing," said Lynette. Scott turned to her and felt her gaze tear through him with the heat of a laser. "Kevin saved her and her baby's lives. They would have been in the car right when the truck hit it if Kevin hadn't stopped them. Fact is, about half the people who were watching our little tussle would have been right in harm's way if he hadn't done what he did."

"Lucky," said Scott again. He said it bitterly, because in that instant he couldn't help but wonder why some families were so lucky, while others - his, for example - had no chance at all.

"Lucky nothing," said Lynette. And her voice was so peculiar that Scott had no choice but to turn and look her straight in the eye. Her gaze was intense and focused in a way that he had never seen it before. "Scott," she said in a whisper, and then added the words that he knew in that instant that she was going to say; that he felt in his bones like Truth spoken from a mountain top: "He knew, Scott. Kevin knew what was going to happen. He saw it happen."

"What?" said Scott, though he knew perfectly well what Lynette was saying. "You saying Kevin saw the truck coming?"

Lynette shook her head. "Not like that. I'm saying that he saw the whole thing - the truck, the car, the crash, Ruth and her baby dying. He saw it all...before it happened, and stopped it."





***





27.

***

Lynette could see at once that Scott didn't believe her. And before she had a chance to really convince him, a crowd started to gather around them. One of the people who came over was Ruth, the woman whom Kevin had saved. She was holding her baby, and crying.

"I know I already told you this, but thank you. I'm so sorry about what I said about your son. If it hadn't been for him...." Her voice trailed off to nothing and she held out her baby as though the child was a punctuation mark that would make the sentence fragment she had just uttered make sense.

And to Lynette, the gesture did make sense. You saved my baby, said the gesture. Your Kevin saved my child.

Lynette was a mother herself, so understood completely. She nodded and smiled and touched Ruth on the shoulder. Ruth held her hand in her own, and Lynette was suddenly reminded of the many stories of Jesus she heard in church. She imagined that someone who had just been healed by the Savior might have held His hand that way.

"Don't," she said, pulling her hand away. "Don't thank me, just remember who it was that helped you." And of course by that she meant not that Ruth should remember that Kevin particularly was the person who came to her aid, but rather that she should remember that it was an autistic child, a special child, who had saved her. And so she should hold those children - all of them - as special in her own heart from this time forward.

A paramedic came over to the group, holding a medical kit. "I understand someone here was hurt," he said.

"Just me," said Scott. "Not much, just a -"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it," interrupted the paramedic with a good-natured smile. "You're tough, you're manly, you don't need medical aid, yadda yadda yadda. Just let me check you out, okay?"