The Bridge by Butler James

Author:Butler, James [Butler, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: James Butler
Published: 2014-09-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Clint Edwards and his wife, Mattie, were driving a semi truck from California to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. They had been on the road all night and were looking for a motel to sit out the storm. Mattie was as good a driver as Clint in normal weather, but they changed places when the snow started. He had come this way so many times that he knew the road by memory and she felt safer with him driving. There was no sign of any traffic, so Clint took his eyes off the road just for a second. He looked over at Mattie who was trying to nap and only caught a glimpse of Hank’s headlights when their vehicles collided. He hit the air brakes, but they locked and the loaded trailer jerked and slid on the packed snow and pushed Hank and Bonnie’s car off the road and into the cemetery. The trailer jackknifed, taking out the fence and slamming into a series of tombstones before finally coming to a stop. Then there was an explosion. Not from fire, but from inside the trailer.

“Oh, no,” said Clint. “There goes the load.” He checked on Mattie, who had sprung straight up out of her seat when the truck slammed into the car and was wide awake now, wondering what had happened.

“Are you alright? Did we get hit by a bomb or something?” He looked her over, making sure she wasn’t hurt.

“What was that?” she said. “What happened?”

“We hit somebody. I think it was a car, but I’m not sure.”

He used his radio and got the sheriff and an emergency team on their way out, then climbed down out of the cab and waded through the snow to the car all crumpled up between a huge granite monument and his front bumper. Steam was spewing out of the radiator and water was pouring out of the fuel tanks.

“Better shut down the truck,” he yelled back at Mattie. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“We need the heater,” she called back.

He climbed over the wreckage to the driver’s side of the car, afraid of what he was going to find, and reached through the shattered window. The man’s head had smashed into the windshield and the steering wheel was bent into a semicircle. The woman had gone through the windshield and was halfway out onto the crumpled hood. It was obvious that both Bonnie and Hank were dead.

“They didn’t have on seat belts and their air bags didn’t deploy,” he called out to Mattie.

“In a minute,” she called back, not understanding what he had said.

He checked their pulse anyway. Nothing. No one could live through that. He could hear Mattie on the CB radio talking to other truckers, giving them their location and advising them to stay away.

Then he heard Shannon cry.

He tried jamming himself through the shattered window over Hank’s body, trying to reach the baby, but the doors and roof were crushed in and Shannon was out of reach.. He climbed up on the

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