and cause the marked child to bolt straight into danger rather than away
from it.
Seven seconds.
He heard the muffled growl of an engine, which instantly changed to a
loud roar, then a piston-shattering scream. A pickup truck shot over
the brow of the hill. It actually took flight for an instant, afternoon
sun flashing off its windshield and coruscating across its chromework,
as if it were a flaming chariot descending from the heavens on judgment
day. With a shrill bark of rubber against blacktop, the front tires met
the pavement again, and the rear of the truck slammed down with a
jarring crash.
ù Five seconds.
The kids in the street scattered-except for a sandy-haired boy with
violet eyes the shade of faded rose petals. He just stood there,
holding a lunchbox covered with brightly colored cartoon figures, one
tennis shoe untied, watching the truck bear down on him, unable to move,
as if he sensed that it wasn’t just a truck rushing to meet him but his
destiny was inescapable. He was an eight- or nine-year-old boy with
nowhere to go but to the grave.
Two seconds.
Leaping directly into the path of the oncoming pickup, Jim grabbed the
kid. In what felt like a dream-slow swan dive off a high cliff, he
carried the boy with him in a smooth arc to the pavement, rolling toward
the leaf littered gutter, feeling nothing from his impact with the
street, his nerves so numbed by terror and adrenaline that he might as
well have been tumbling across a field of lush grass and soft loam.
The roar of the truck was the loudest thing he had ever heard, as if
were a thunder within him, and he felt something strike his left foot,
bad as a hammer blow. In the same instant a terrible wrenching force
seem to wring his ankle as if it were a rag. A white-hot current of
pain crackled up his leg, sizzling into his hip joint, exploding in that
socket of bone like a Fourth of July bottle rocket bursting in a night
sky.
Holly started after the man who had collided with her, angry and
intending to tell him off But before she reached the intersection, a
gray-an red pickup erupted over the brow of the hill, as if fired out of
a giant slingshot. She halted at the curb.
The scream of the truck engine was a magic incantation that slowed the
flow of time, stretching each second into what seemed to be a minute
From the curb, she saw the stranger sweep the boy out of the path of the
pickup, executing the rescue with such singular agility and grace that
almost appeared to be performing a mad, slow-motion ballet in the street
She saw the bumper of the truck strike his left foot, and watched in
horror as his shoe was torn off and tossed high into the air, tumbling
end over end. Peripherally, she was aware of the man and boy rolling
toward the gutter, the truck swerving sharply to the right, the startled
crossing guard dropping the paddlelike “stop” sign, the truck
ricocheting off a car parked across the street, the man and boy coming
to rest against the curb, truck tipping onto its side and sliding
downhill in cascades of yellow and blue sparks-but all the while her
attention was focused primarily on the shoe tumbling up, up, into the
air, silhouetted against the blue sky, hanging at the apex of its flight
for what seemed like an hour, then tumbling slowly, slowly down again.
She couldn’t look away from it, was mesmerized by it, because she had
the macabre feeling that the foot was still in the shoe, torn off at the
ankle, bristling with splinters of bone, trailing shards of arteries and
veins. Down it came, down, down, straight toward her, and she felt a
scream swelling in the back of her throat.
Down. . . down. . .
The battered shoe-a Reebok-plopped into the gutter in front of her, she
lowered her eyes to it the way she always looked into the face of the
monster in a nightmare, not wanting to see but unable to turn away,