The smell of pumpkin pie filled the dimly lit kitchen. If it had not been a complete mess of overflowing dishes and garbage, the room would have been pleasant and appatizing.
Through the front window, old widow Mary watched the busy college traffic zoom by as 3 o'clock class's let out. A disturbing screeching came from the south end of the house as break pad desperatly clung to the tire walls of an older burgendy sedan. The old woman watched it roll up to the street light, white fluffy smoke billowing over the tires and into the air.
She walked with her books every day, and she had always done so. From the very first school book she was instructed to take care of in 2nd grade, Tiffinay had always carried them with her back and forth to school. She had never used a locker, not in elementary, middle, or high school. Now in college it was even more important since the books had cost her a whole months rent to buy.
She cringed and staggered away from the road as a car started howling next to her. It skidded and slid as the driver tried to make the car work. The brakes somehow seemed stuck but the car just kept going, as if the screaming clouds comming from the tire walls meant nothing to it's current momentum, Tiffany started to bolt down the road away from it as she realized it was going to go through the intersection.
Trevor and Tony had met the year before in a bio lab. The inside the wesco after studying and had coffee while they discussed what meaningless crap the college had let the professors push on their students. As Tony's sister pulled out of the Wesco to hurry to her 3 o'clock class, she had stopped to ask him to check her car after school to make sure it wasn't burning up fluids. Trevor was sure she was about to ask him to go to the student athlete meeting with her when she lost the nerve and made up a wierd story about the car.
Tony slugged Trevor in the arm as he was picking up his coffee. "I don't care, NOT my sister dude."
Tony laughed but then seemed startled when he looked back out the window. "I hope that isn't break fluid from her car..."
Racheal was angry at herself for being too pathetic to ask him out, but at least she still had time to try again. A burgendy car that pulled out from the wesco behind her seemed to be riding her bumper since the last stop sign. She couldn't see what the man was doing but somehow he seemed frantic when she looked back through her rear view.
Racheal slowed down for a second, but the man just swerved into the other lane. He was in oncoming traffic, he seemed to be yelling at her, but she could not tell what he was saying, and pressed on the gas to get as far as quickly away from him as possible. At the next intersection, she blew through the yeild sign, and so did he. Suddenly it sounded like he had slammed on the breaks. Racheal sighed in relief, a bit shaken by the oddity of it all.
She could still hear the breaks as she turned a corner to head into the college parking lot.
At least 40 students getting out, and going in to college that day watched as the car slid almost paranormally down the road. Smoke and noise, horrific scraping of metal on metal had followed the car for ten minutes as he went plowing down the long college road. Finally at the non residential intersection, far away from all those cell phones, and college security cameras, far away from anyone who could have stopped to call for help, or done anything other then watch as the car rolled by, Gerald Major, the driver of the 1995 burgendy sedan ran down a ten year old boy who was walking home from the bus stop. The cars anti-locks had malfunctioned, the accelorator had stuck, and despite trying to swerve the car off the road to avoid missing the child, an inch of the bumper had grazed the child enough to throw him onto the pavement as the back tire swerved when the fronts hit the dirt.
No comments:
Post a Comment