The Meridians(74)

Or perhaps they would just hit a bad bump in the road and go flying. Again, the outcome - a rolled car with nothing left of them but a few wet smears - would be the same.

But no matter what happened, if Kevin was not buckled up, Scott knew that the boy would have no chance of survival. So he tried to grab the boy and pull him back to his seat. But Kevin threw Scott's arm away from him, and when Scott tried to grab him again, Kevin actually gritted his teeth and growled at him, growled like a dog that had just been threatened and was about to bite back.

The car began to shudder in his hands, and Scott had to put all his attention on his driving, letting Kevin do what he wanted, which apparently was to flip himself over into the back seat beside his mother.

Scott juked left with the car, the move barely keeping him out of range as the gray man again tried to ram them, but this time missed. Still, the odds were that Mr. Gray was going to bring them down. And sooner rather than later.

Scott cranked the car suddenly to the left, straining the vehicle to the limits of its endurance as he pulled into the wrong side of the street. It was the middle of the night, almost morning, in fact, so his chances of meeting someone on the road and having a head-on collision were slight. Slight was not the same thing as nonexistent, however, a fact that he was keenly aware of as he moved the car into the wrong lane. But he needed to do it in order to try to get them out of this mess.

Mr. Gray followed him into the lane, staying close on his tail, sticking to him like glue.

Scott cranked the wheel again, and again Mr. Gray followed, staying right behind.

Scott became aware that the road they were on was lined on both sides by irrigation canals. Unlike the arid desert of Los Angeles, where water rarely flowed freely unless instigated by the surge of a sprinkler head, Idaho had enough water and to spare. Water was, in fact, deemed a public property, and so irrigation ditches could often be found on the sides of roads, gathering rainwater and stream runoff and shunting it through the rural areas that dotted even cities such as Boise and Meridian. The water was used to feed livestock, to water crops, and for a million other things that an agrarian area needed water for.

Usually the irrigation ditches were a thing of beauty to Scott, quietly burbling and bubbling along, bringing life-giving water to any and all who needed it. But tonight, with a three foot wide and two foot deep ditch on either side of the road, Scott was keenly aware that the water features represented just one more possible way they could be killed: dropping into one of the irrigation ditches at the speed they were holding at would surely result in the total destruction of both the ditch, the car, and the car's occupants.

The wobbling of the wheel under his hands intensified, and Scott could tell that he had only a matter of seconds to put some plan into action that would save them. They were well out of the more densely populated areas of Meridian, driving down a long road that had nothing but farms and farmhouses on either side, no hope of any kind of help that Scott could see.

And Kevin was still unbuckled, trying to get into the backseat of the car with his mother. He finally made it, though Scott thought for one horrible moment that the boy was going to be ejected from the car when Mr. Gray hit them again right as Kevin was passing into the backseat.

The boy made it, though, climbing into his mother's arms. He threw his own arms around her, then whispered something to her. Scott could hear the whispering, but could not hear any detail, so he hoped whatever the boy was saying to his mother, it was something along the lines of "Please snap out of it and try to figure out some way for us to get out of this mess before we end up dead."

Surprisingly, he must in fact have said something very much like that - or at least like the first part of that - because a moment later Lynette stopped whimpering, and Scott heard twin clicks as she belted herself and Kevin into the backseat. She wasn't helping much, but at least she wasn't just curled up in a ball on the seat waiting to die, so he counted this as a definite improvement.

He turned the wheel again as Mr. Gray slammed into them. But this time, the wheel spun out of control in his hands. He saw them heading straight at one of the irrigation ditches, and braced for a watery impact that would signal the end of their flight and very likely the end of their lives.

But the impact never came. With a thud and a thump, Scott felt the car pass over one of the small bridges that crossed over the irrigation ditches every fifty or sixty feet. They had hit with exactly the right angle to get over the ditch. To survive.

Not so Mr. Gray, however. Scott heard a shattering sound, like a world of metal imploding on itself, and half-turned in his seat in time to see his car - the car that Mr. Gray had been driving - smack directly into one of the irrigation canals. The front end of the car dipped down, and then stopped instantly as it hit the bank of the canal. Scott could actually see the car ripple with the force of the impact.

Then the car started to flip over.

Scott kept one eye on his rearview mirror, even as he stomped on the brakes and struggled to bring his own car under control and get it down to a less-deadly speed. So he saw the back of the car rise up in a perfect arc, flipping the car end over end, and out of the irrigation canal.

The car did not simply come to rest, however, but continued to flip end over end. The vehicle quickly stopped resembling anything like a car, and quickly began to look like a spray of glass and metal orbiting around some gravitational field in deep space.

Then there was another crash, and Scott's heart leapt as he saw something that warmed his heart.