Coda Page 3

  Jody picked her earbuds up off the floor. As she ascended back up to place them in her pocket with her iPod, a wave of dizziness overcame her.

  Stop spinning, everything please stop spinning.

  After a minute of trying to force the world to stop spinning, Jody felt a little better. No great damage had been done, just a case of the dizzies from one hell of an earthquake. She opened her eyes and looked over to her mother.

  No airbag for mom—it hadn’t gone off—and her head must have banged against the steering wheel. A stream of blood made a path from her forehead to her chin and her eyes were closed.

  * * *

  The world was spinning. Brett saw the sun for a brief second, then it was gone. Back again, then gone. Something was picking up the van and twirling it like a top. The shotgun and handgun banged and clanged across the floor, and it was something of a minor miracle that neither of them went off.

  He let go of the wheel and placed his hands above him, palms out, hands pressed against the roof, doing his best to keep himself level in the seat as the van tilted over and fell onto its side. His unhooked seatbelt (although Brett swore he had hooked it closed but he could have very easily forgotten) dangled out the window and hit the still moving ground. His elbow followed. The road tore into his skin and a scream tore out of his mouth. Quickly he pulled his arm back, but not before a good chunk of skin had been left behind on the freeway.

  Another barrage of punches hit the van. Whether they came from colliding with more cars or were part of the earthquake was anybody’s guess. The van bounced along the road on its side, flipped over onto its roof where it stayed for a second, then slammed down onto the passenger’s side.

  The glass of the passenger side window shattered and shards of the stuff flew through the cabin. Rachel was peppered with grains of glass that she’d be picking out of her hair for weeks, should she live that long.

  The road once again flicked the van with an unseen finger. It landed back on all four tires—three of which were now flat.

  The auditory carnage of traffic accident after traffic accident filled the van. Underneath the mayhem of noise, Brett was pretty sure he heard the most people yelling all at once than he ever had in his seventeen years on the planet. It was like being on a roller coaster with three-hundred people. In a different situation, this might be fun—this might be just the way he’d want to roll. But what he saw through the cracked front window was vastly different from what had been out there a few minutes ago, solidifying the fact that he certainly did not want to roll this way.

  An SUV had parked itself on top of a sports car.

  A station wagon was tipping ever so slightly over the edge of the freeway.

  The trailer of a semi blocked three of the four lanes up ahead.

  Back in the van Jimmy hunched up, crouched to see the view through the window, and whistled. He was bleeding out of his right eye.

  “So much for Vegas,” he said.

  7.

  Dorothy O’Connell tried to push herself away from the steering wheel, which was smashed against her chest. Her torso moved back two inches then stopped. The chair had her pinned. She tried to holler for help, but all that came out was a muffled grunt followed by a saliva bubble spotted with blood. She coughed and felt some phlegm loosen inside her chest—although she had a feeling that it wasn’t phlegm. Something inside her had broken, that was for sure. Her St. Bernard popped his head between the two front seats and gave his mama a lick on the cheek.

  “It’s okay, Roscoe. We’re okay.”

  Roscoe smiled at her. The old boy was having the time of his life and seemed not only unphased but uninjured.

  The concrete barrier she’d plowed through had her door jammed shut. And it was like that on the other side, too. No getting out the conventional way. Jesus her chest hurt, and the steering wheel pushing into her rib cage was doing nothing to help that fact.

  Between the seat and the door was a lever, and if she could just reach it she could move the seat back. Just another inch or two, and—there! Her fingers latched onto the lever and pulled up. The reassuring click let her know the chair was released. She pushed with her legs, but the seat didn’t move.

  Another kick provided the same result. The chair wouldn’t be moving for anyone. Dorothy relaxed, let go of the lever, and rested her head on the steering wheel. All that pulling and pushing had really taken it out of her. More than it should have. Sure, she was old (she decided to stop counting birthdays at seventy-nine), but let’s get serious: pulling a lever up shouldn’t feel like a ten-mile run. Her insides were definitely not right.

  A panoramic view of the Valley where she grew up filled her vision, graffitied by cracks in the windshield. St. John’s Hospital. The golden arches of McDonald’s. A Salvation Army store.

  Traffic had stopped on Sepulveda Boulevard below her. The street was in pieces, cars were practically on top of one another, motorists and pedestrians alike milled about in wonder and confusion. A few looked up at her and pointed.

  “Praise Jesus,” she muttered at the sight. Another blood-bubble popped from her mouth.

  She tried to move backward again and this time the car teetered. What little breath she had in her lungs stopped short.

  The movement of the car startled Roscoe. He pawed his way up the back seats and kind of slunk-fell into the rear cargo area. Graceful he was not. The station wagon wobbled to and fro for a few seconds, then again calmed down and rested itself on the edge of the freeway thanks to the added weight of one St. Bernard.

  “Don’t move, boy,” she told him, fearful of what any further movements might have on the balance of the car. “Now stay there.” If Roscoe did as ordered (and Dorothy was pretty sure he would, he was good about that sort of thing), his weight might be able to keep the car level until help arrived. “Stay.”

  Motorists slowly began to get out of their vehicles, looking every bit as dazed and confused as Dorothy felt. A quarter of a mile away she saw a strong-looking woman heave herself out of an over-turned semi. The woman looked around, shook her head, then began to walk to the rear of her trailer which had the front end of a Jeep parked in it.

  “You okay?”

  Dorothy spun her head to the right to try and see the origin of the voice. It had come from behind her, behind the car. She had to look into her rearview mirror to see a man thirty years younger than her and wearing a mechanic’s uniform peer into her eyes through the back window.

  “You okay?” the man repeated, louder this time.

  “No,” she coughed.

  “Well, let’s see if we can’t fix that. Can you crawl around to the back, towards me?”

  Dorothy held his stare in the mirror. “N-no.” She coughed again. “I’m trapped against the steering wheel.”

  The man rubbed his chin, thinking. He looked down. “Can you start the car?”

  The guy was brilliant. Why hadn’t she thought of that? All she had to do was crank up the ol’ wagon and back on out, so she gave the keys a turn.

  Click-click-click.

  “Again,” said the man.

  Click-click-click.

  The man nodded as if he’d half been expecting to hear that sound. “Starters on these are always the first to go,” he said. Then: “Can you move the seat back?”

  Dorothy shook her head. Nope.

  Opening the back doors was out of the question—the barrier had them pinned shut on both sides so the guy couldn’t simply hop in and pull her out. She could tell from the look on the man’s face that he realized this, too. What she needed was, what did they call it? The Jaws of Life.

  Back into deep thought the man went. Dorothy didn’t care what the guy came up with as long as it was soon and involved getting her and Roscoe out of the station wagon and off the freeway.

  “What’s your name?” he asked, adjusting his cap and wiping fresh sweat off his brow.

  Stalling, that’s what he was doing. He didn’t know how to get to her or how to get her out
of the car. Starting the car seemed to be his one and only idea.

  “Just take Roscoe,” Dorothy said. “Get him outta here.” She started crying. She looked back in the rearview mirror and saw the guy shake his head.

  “What’s your name?” he asked again.

  “Dorothy,” she replied.

  “Okay, Dorothy. Can you pop the trunk?”

  “What?” she asked, sucking in a breath that hurt. She brought a hand to her ribs and felt her bruised bones. Her ribs stung and felt like they were on fire. Broken. Yeah, they were broken, alright.

  “The back cargo space, the trunk,” he said. “Can you pop it open?”

  “It doesn’t have one of those things.”

  “Can you toss the keys back to me?”

  Despite the fact that she could still turn them to get that wonderful click-click-click sound, the keys would not loosen from the ignition. She tried the steering wheel—maybe it had locked up on her. It moved, but only a few inches; her bruised breasts got in the way of the spokes and she couldn’t pull back any farther. But it moved enough for her to tell that it wasn’t locked. The keys were stuck, that was all. Must’ve gotten bent all to hell in the accident.

  As she moved to look back at the nice man trying to save her life, Dorothy heard something go snap in her chest. This sound was followed by a quick and jarring pain in her rib cage, and this new pain pulsed with each beat of her heart as she wheezed in breath after breath of humid summer air, now filled with the tang of gasoline and the sting of smoke. Something warm and wet escaped from her mouth. No blood-bubble this time—she had a steady flow going.

  The man must’ve seen the blood dripping from her lips because his expression emulated her own: things were not good.

  “Problem?” he asked.

  Dorothy tried to pull the keys out again, and it was still a no-go. “They’re stuck.”

  “What?”

  “The key, they’re stuck,” she said. “I can’t pull them out.”

  The man grumbled something (she thought she heard some swearing), then said, “Can you pull off the trunk key, toss it back to me?”

  Another good idea, but, “It’s the same key that starts the car,” she explained.

  More grumbling as he moved closer to Dorothy. Staring at the inaccessible back door, he grumbled again. This time Dorothy definitely heard swearing in there.

  Curious about the strange man standing outside his mistress’ car, Roscoe followed him from the trunk to the back seat. The shift in weight gave the front of the car all it needed to scoot forward three inches.

  The rear tires lifted off the ground and Dorothy let out a scream as Roscoe fell into the back seat foot-well.

  The car moved another inch. The back tires lifted up another three. Forward the station wagon went. It was going off the edge and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.

  Scraping, grinding, metal against concrete. Then, suddenly, abruptly, it all stopped. The wagon halted as if someone had slammed on the brakes; but Dorothy’s foot already had that pedal mashed to the floor, so something else had stopped the car.

  Out her window, the barrier was gone. The front of the car now hung free over Sepulveda Boulevard. What a view. So what had stopped her?

  * * *

  The woman in the station wagon was one lucky lady. The concrete barrier, although keeping the back doors pinned shut, was also serving as a stop-device; the wagon had wedged itself so tightly between them that it couldn’t move, only teeter there like a see-saw.

  Leaning to one side, Mike noticed that the front doors were now free. They were bent all to hell, but maybe…

  “Try opening the door now,” he said.

  Dorothy gave it a try. “Nothing,” she said.

  Okay. She still couldn’t get out, but it didn’t look like the car was going anywhere. At least not right now. The front door was too far away for Mike to try any heroics, but as long as everything stayed stable they should be able to wait it out. He just hoped Dorothy survived that long. From what she’d told him, it sounded like the steering column was crushing her chest. She was old and there was no telling how long she’d last.

  And there was no telling when help would arrive. The Valley itself was demolished, the victim of the nuclear bomb that could be Mother Nature. Mike could only imagine what things were like downtown. It was a miracle they survived at all, and Mike was pretty sure another miracle would be needed in order for help to arrive within the next twenty-four hours.

  The St. Bernard picked himself up off the floor and positioned himself on the seat with a wiggle of his ass. He looked at Mike and panted.

  8.

  Jillian Hadley had been driving a semi for ten of her thirty-five years. Perhaps it was genetic disposition (her father had been a truck driver as had his father before him) or maybe she just dug the road. It was probably a combination of both. While there was certainly something to be said about following in her father’s footsteps and going against the grain by becoming the first female truck driver in her family, the site of those white and yellow lines—dashed and solid—flying past her in the corner of her left eye seemed just as important. They made everything alright somehow. They were a comfort, and after a decade they had become a part of her. Old friends, those lines were, letting her know that she was going somewhere, always moving toward the horizon yet never reaching it. That was one of the many beauties of the horizon, she supposed. No matter how fast or how long you drove, you never hit it.

  Speaking of hitting things, there wasn’t much left of the Jeep Cherokee that had started a fight with her trailer. It was only half a Jeep now, its entire front end flattened by the weight of the trailer, which had been picked up by God Himself and dropped onto the Jeep during the earthquake. The trailer’s back tires had landed squarely in its cab, crushing both bucket seats. The engine had been pushed out the front end like the puss of a pimple.

  Slowly she walked to the driver’s side, broken glass crackling underneath her shoes, not sure what to expect. Actually, she knew exactly what to expect—she just didn’t want to think about it and had no idea why in God’s name she wanted to look at it.

  The left hand of the driver stuck out through a busted window. The arm it was attached to was buried underneath one of the tires from her trailer. The upper torso of the passenger, a woman who was now forever stuck in her twenties, lay in the passenger seat, eyes open in amazement, her last sight being that of a giant semi-trailer heading right for her. There were worse ways to go, but Jillian couldn’t think of any at that moment.

  She leaned against the Jeep for support. Her hand shook as it touched the hot metal of the roof. Eyes down, she looked at her feet. She stood in the middle of a pile of broken glass and blood. Jillian vomited. Now she was standing in that, too.

  After wiping fresh puke off her lips, she moved away from the car with the dead couple in it. Her eyes drifted upward across the freeway where she saw car after car in similar states to those of the Jeep she

  (no, not me, the trailer, not me, not my fault)

  had crushed. Some people were just starting to get out of their vehicles. Others were still in their seats, trying to comprehend what had happened and what to do next.

  As she noticed a sea of car alarms going off all across the San Fernando Valley, her eyes spotted a very worried looking man in a mechanic’s jumpsuit standing next to the trunk of a station wagon. The front of the station wagon hung precariously over the edge of the freeway.

  A quick scan of the people on the road showed no one rushing to a scene that looked like it was going to end badly. Everyone was either too busy, too startled or too dead to have noticed.

  Except for the worried man in the mechanic’s uniform.

  One shoulder-slump and sigh later, Jillian returned to the cab of her truck. She pulled herself up to the door—the left side of the semi was now aimed at the sky—without too much trouble. The woman prided herself on the physical attributes of her body. Not the naughty bits
men look at (although she thought those were just fine and dandy, thank you very much) but her tone, muscle and stamina. She had all those in spades and more. A steady workout regimen and a healthy diet was the only surefire way to keep a body fit for the road. An early death due to a poor diet was one road Jillian did not want to drive down. All she had to do was quit her pesky smoking habit, but today wasn’t the day to quit. No sirree.

  She dropped herself into the cab and let her feet fall the twenty inches to the passenger door. Behind the seats and next to her cooler full of essentials—fruits and Vitamin Water—she found the cell phone she was searching for.

  Her pack of cigarettes waved to her from the far end of the dash, nestled next to the window. She grabbed the phone and shoved it in a pocket, grabbed the smokes into shoved it into her other pocket, lifted herself out of the cab and headed for the worried man in the mechanic’s uniform by the station wagon.

  * * *

  “Come on, boy. Come on back here.”

  For the past ten minutes Mike Randal had been trying to convince Roscoe the dog to return to the trunk. So far he had been less than successful. The dog simply looked at the man, cocked his head, and gave him a dog-smile.

  “Go on, Ros,” Dorothy said. “He won’t hurt you.”

  Roscoe stayed put. He wouldn’t be leaving Dorothy’s side any time soon.

  Never having had a dog (he wasn’t very fond of them—they were smelly, dirty beasts), Mike couldn’t comprehend why the animal would choose to stay near his mistress and certain death when he could easily hop in the back and be safe. Or at least safer. He knew the dog probably didn’t possess the mental capacity to fully understand what was happening, and that’s what bugged him the most. Dogs were stupid, and stupid things annoyed him. At least a cat could learn to not shit on the carpet. Hell, a cat would probably be halfway home by now.