The Meridians (25 page)

She looked up, and saw Scott. The man with the scarred face was not angry-looking as most of the people around were, but neither was he smiling. At first she thought that he was going to try to wrestle Kevin to the ground, but in the next instant realized that she needn't have worried about any such thing.

Instead of trying to overpower Kevin physically, Scott dropped the groceries he had been holding and then knelt on one knee in front of her son. "Hey, son," he whispered intensely, "if you're going to hit someone, why don't you take a poke at me?"

Instead of continuing his temper tantrum, instead of "taking a poke" at Scott, Kevin did something that not only had Lynette never before seen, but even on this day of firsts she was utterly stunned by it.

Kevin stopped crying.

He stopped screaming.

He dropped his hands.

And
ran
into Scott's arms, rushing at the man so hard and fast that Scott was almost knocked off his feet.

And then Lynette
was
knocked off her feet, along with the rest of the people who were watching at the entrance to the store.

Because at that moment the world exploded.

***

26.

***

Scott felt something strange. A bee was in his ear. Only not in his ear, bees didn't go in people's ears, did they?

Did they?

"Scott," said a voice. The voice was familiar, but at the same time impossible to place. It was warped and strange, as though the speaker were at the other end of a long tunnel, the echoes reverberating until the original sound was lost and the voice an enigma of tone and timbre. "Scott," the voice came again.

Scott looked up and saw a familiar face. "Gil?" he said quietly. "What the hell are you doing here?" And though he did not say it out loud, internally he continued, "And where the hell
is
here, anyway?"

Gil looked at him - looked down at him; Scott gradually realized that he was laying on the ground - with tenderness. "I came shopping with you, bud," answered the tree of a man. "Remember?"

Shopping. The word seemed familiar, but like everything else in this strange day, Scott was having trouble putting any meaning to it.

"Shopping?" he said out loud.

"Here," said Gil, and reached down a large hand. Scott took it, and felt himself hefted to his feet as easily as if he were a poodle rather than a grown man.

Gil looked at something directly to the right of Scott. "Better get that looked at."

At first Scott did not know what Gil was talking about, then he realized. "The bees?" he asked.

Scott's large friend looked at him quizzically. "I don't know about bees, but your ear is probably going to sting like heck."

Scott put a finger to his right ear, and felt a thick stickiness. He pulled back his hand and looked at it. His fingers were bloody. He looked askance at Gil.

"Don't worry, you're not going to look like Van Gogh. Piece of shrapnel just nicked you is all."

Shrapnel? thought Scott. What's going on?

Then it all came back in a flash. Lynette's son had been having a tantrum of some kind, and Scott had grabbed the boy by the hand to keep him from attacking his mother.

His mother.

"Where's Lynette?" he asked, surprised at the level of concern he heard in his own voice.

"She's okay," said Gil soothingly. "She's with her son."

"Where?" demanded Scott.

"They're over there," said Gil, pointing at a crowd of people milling around nearby.

"What the hell happened, Gil?" Scott asked, his head starting to throb.

Before the big man could answer, Scott heard someone call his name and turned around just in time for Lynette to barrel into his arms.

"You fell down and there was so much blood and we were so worried -" began the woman.

"Easy, easy," said Scott, and stroked her hair comfortingly without thinking twice about it. Then he froze as he realized he was doing it. What would Amy think? he wondered to himself, and dropped his hands from Lynette's hair, trying not to think how thick and vibrant it had felt in his hands; trying not to notice how lithe and alive her body felt against his own. "What happened?"

"What happened is that Kevin looks like he's a hero," said Gil with a chuckle.

Lynette flashed a dazzling smile at the big man. "Thanks for watching out for Scott," she said.

Gil waved off the praise. "Shoot," he said, "tough sucker like Scott doesn't need an old mother hen like me looking out for him. Well," he added with a wink, "not usually, anyway." Then he looked around. "Where's Kevin?" he asked.

"I got him to the car," answered Lynette. "Your wife's with him. Hope you don't mind."

"Mind?" said Gil with a laugh. "Don't mind at all. Fact is, Brenda gets all riled up and cranky when she goes too long without getting to spend time with your boy, so actually, you're doing me a favor. Still," he said, looking meaningfully from Scott to Lynette and back again, "I guess I'll mosey over to the car and make sure that she hasn't decided to adopt him or something."

And with that Gil ambled off, looking for all the world like a tree that had grown legs and decided to take a walk around the parking lot of the supermarket.

The supermarket.

Scott looked around, suddenly realizing what had happened. "There was an explosion!" he shouted. Without thinking, he held Lynette at arm's length to see if she was hurt in any way.

"I'm fine, Scott," she protested. "In fact, the only one who got hurt at all was you. I wanted to call an ambulance, but Gil said you were..." she paused and blushed cutely. "Well, he said you were a tough something-or-other and that if I called an ambulance it would just embarrass you."

Scott couldn't help but laugh to hear that. "Don't you listen to him next time. I'm a big wimp and you are free to call an ambulance any time I hit my head, fall over, stub my toe, or suffer a really serious hangnail."

Lynette laughed, the musical sound cutting through much of the fog that still clung to Scott's thoughts. "Seriously, though," he continued, "how is it?"

"You might need a stitch or two," said Lynette after looking at his ear for a second, "but other than that you look fine."

"Other than that?" he said with a grimace. "Lady, have you
seen
my face recently."

"Oh, your face is fine," she said. And she said it in such a sincere, off-handed way that it came across as greater praise than if she had suddenly flown into a monologue about the benefits of facial scars. She blushed again - she was pretty when she blushed, he noted - and he felt the blood rising to his own cheeks as well.

"Well, even if I believe
that
lie," he said after a wonderfully awkward moment of silence, "I'd still like someone to tell me what happened."

Lynette put a hand to her mouth. "Oh, Scott," she said, "I can hardly believe it. You remember that beastly woman that I was arguing with?"

"The bigoted bitch?"

That drew another blush from Lynette. "Her name's Ruth, actually."

"You guys have become quite close, I see."

"We have, in point of fact," said Lynette with a puckishly arched eyebrow.

"Do tell, milady, do tell," said Scott. He could feel sticky wetness on the side of his already-marred face and down on his neck and knew he should probably have Gil take him to the nearby hospital to get looked at, but wouldn't have left this conversation for the world.

Before Lynette could continue, however, the loud wail of a siren drew his attention. His trained ear told him instantly that it was an ambulance. "I thought you said Gil wouldn't let you call an ambulance," he said.

"It's not for you," answered Lynette, and her expression grew suddenly downcast.

"Well for who then?"

Instead of answering with words, Lynette instead took Scott by the shoulders and gently turned him around to face the parking lot of the supermarket. Scott gaped, his mouth falling open so fully that he swore he heard his jaw hinges crack from the strain.

"What the hell...?" he began.

The parking lot was a smoldering mess. At first it looked like half the cars were on fire, but then he quickly realized that all the smoke was coming from only two vehicles: a large custom pickup truck with a lift kit and roll bars installed, and a gray Volvo station wagon. The truck had clearly smashed into the Volvo, which was in one of the parking spaces, and the force of the crash coupled with the added height given by the lift kit had propelled the truck right up and over the Volvo until the truck was resting on top of it as neatly as could be.

Whoever was in the Volvo is a goner, he thought automatically, his cop training surfacing dustily to the forefront of his mind. Out loud, he asked, "Anyone in the Volvo?"

"No," said Lynette. "The ambulance is for the people in the truck."

"Alive?"

Lynette grew quiet. Answer enough. "The truck just came out of nowhere, running right down the front of the parking lot and then crashing into the Volvo. The truck must have been carrying something flammable because, well...." Her voice drifted off, as though she was unable or unwilling to complete the thought.

"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."