‘What’s he think he’s doing?’ Todd asked.
The driver of the car immediately behind must have wondered the same thing, because he laid on his horn – a long, pissed-off blat that made people stir and snort and look around. For a moment the car with the yellow fog-lamps stayed where it was. Then it shot forward. Not to the left, toward the now full-to-overflowing parking lot, but directly at the people penned within the maze of tapes and posts.
‘Hey!’ someone shouted.
The crowd swayed backward in a tidal motion. Tom was shoved against Todd, who went down on his ass. Tom fought for balance, almost found it, and then the man in front of him – yelling, no, screaming – drove his butt into Tom’s crotch and one flailing elbow into his chest. Tom fell on top of his buddy, heard the bottle of Bell’s shatter somewhere between them, and smelled the sharp reek of the remaining whiskey as it ran across the pavement.
Great, now I’ll smell like a barroom on Saturday night.
He struggled to his feet in time to see the car – it was a Mercedes, all right, a big sedan as gray as this foggy morning – plowing into the crowd, spinning bodies out of its way as it came, describing a drunken arc. Blood dripped from the grille. A woman went skidding and rolling across the hood with her hands out and her shoes gone. She slapped at the glass, grabbed at one of the windshield wipers, missed, and tumbled off to one side. Yellow DO NOT CROSS tapes snapped. A post clanged against the side of the big sedan, which did not slow its roll in the slightest. Tom saw the front wheels pass over the sleeping bag and the burly man, who had been crouched protectively over it with one hand raised.
Now it was coming right at him.
‘Todd!’ he shouted. ‘Todd, get up!’
He grabbed at Todd’s hands, got one of them, and pulled. Someone slammed into him and he was driven back to his knees. He could hear the rogue car’s motor, revving full-out. Very close now. He tried to crawl, and a foot clobbered him in the temple. He saw stars.
‘Tom?’ Todd was behind him now. How had that happened? ‘Tom, what the fuck?’
A body landed on top of him, and then something else was on top of him, a huge weight that pressed down, threatening to turn him to jelly. His hips snapped. They sounded like dry turkey bones. Then the weight was gone. Pain with its own kind of weight rushed in to replace it.
Tom tried to raise his head and managed to get it off the pavement just long enough to see taillights dwindling into the fog. He saw glittering shards of glass from the busted pint. He saw Todd sprawled on his back with blood coming out of his head and pooling on the pavement. Crimson tire-tracks ran away into the foggy half-light.
He thought, Linda was right. I should have stayed home.
He thought, I’m going to die, and maybe that’s for the best. Because, unlike Todd Paine, I never got around to cashing in my insurance.
He thought, Although I probably would have, in time.
Then, blackness.
When Tom Saubers woke up in the hospital forty-eight hours later, Linda was sitting beside him. She was holding his hand. He asked her if he was going to live. She smiled, squeezed his hand, and said you bet your patootie.
‘Am I paralyzed? Tell me the truth.’
‘No, honey, but you’ve got a lot of broken bones.’
‘What about Todd?’
She looked away, biting her lips. ‘He’s in a coma, but they think he’s going to come out of it eventually. They can tell by his brainwaves, or something.’
‘There was a car. I couldn’t get out of the way.’
‘I know. You weren’t the only one. It was some madman. He got away with it, at least so far.’
Tom could have cared less about the man driving the Mercedes-Benz. Not paralyzed was good, but—
‘How bad did I get it? No bullshit – be honest.’
She met his eyes but couldn’t hold them. Once more looking at the get-well cards on his bureau, she said, ‘You … well. It’s going to be awhile before you can walk again.’
‘How long?’
She raised his hand, which was badly scraped, and kissed it. ‘They don’t know.’
Tom Saubers closed his eyes and began to cry. Linda listened to that awhile, and when she couldn’t stand it anymore, she leaned forward and began to punch the button on the morphine pump. She kept doing it until the machine stopped giving. By then he was asleep.
1978