Finally the lever is free. I glance at my watch and frantically figure out the timing. If I turn the gas off too soon, their stoves will go out and they’ll come out and check on it at just the wrong time. So many ways for people to die here, I think.
My watch says 6:53. I close my eyes, my thighs quaking from sitting on my haunches for so long, my finger still bleeding and starting to throb. Gingerly I put my gloves back on, watching a stain form in the cloth, but there’s no time to worry about something so trivial now. I still haven’t figured out how to save Sawyer and the other three.
I glance at a window of a nearby house and watch the scene. If Sawyer believes me and plans to get out of there, my bet is that his body bag will disappear. But it only takes a few seconds to find out that there are still four dead from this event. “Come on, Sawyer,” I whisper. “Believe me.”
It’s 6:56, and I’m still sitting here. My phone buzzes in my pocket but I can’t look at it. When I hear a rumbling, I look up and almost wet my pants. A snowplow is barreling up the road in my direction, eight minutes early. I shake my watch in case it stopped, but the second hand keeps ticking away.
A second later I realize the truck is going slower than the one in the vision, and its plow is engaged. It hits me now—in the vision, the road is freshly plowed, and the out-of-control truck has its plow up. This is not the same truck. I breathe a sigh of relief and mop my sweaty forehead.
The plow reaches the end of the road, sweeps around, and does the other side. The snow pummels the sides of the road, reaching the top of the fire hydrant and a third of the way up the signpost. If I weren’t so freaked out, I’d be amazed at the way everything is coming together.
As soon as 6:59 hits, I take the wrench, engage it with the lever, and pull until it’s crosswise from the pipe, a quarter turn. And then I get to my feet and run like hell, hoping it’ll take at least five minutes for the kitchen to figure out the ovens aren’t firing.
It takes me less than a minute to run the two blocks back to the truck, and I’m using some strange superpower energy that I don’t normally have. Chest heaving, I climb in, start it up, and hit the gas. I barrel over the pile of snow left by the recent plowing and drive to Angotti’s and into their parking lot. It feels eerily like what the snowplow will be doing in about three minutes.
Then I stop the truck and just look at this crazy scene, so familiar, so freaking spooky. All the cars are in exactly the right places, the lighting and snow are right, the tables I reserved are empty. I stare for a second, amazed at how everything is exactly as it is in the vision. It’s like being in some weird Twilight Zone episode. But I have no more than a second to ponder it, because I’m still not sure exactly what I’m going to do with this truck.
What I’d like to do is park it in the path of the snowplow and make a run for it, but then it’ll plow my truck into the restaurant too, so I know I’ll have to gun it as it hits me to try to spin the plow. I pull up into that area just to see what happens, and now there are five body bags in the vision. That’s obviously not the way to go. I back up and the bags number four again. “Jeez,” I mutter, checking my watch: 7:02. “A little help here, please.”
I grip the steering wheel and get no inkling, no clue from the vision god. “Ugh!” I yell. “Don’t do this to me!” But the vision just plays in my side mirror, not giving me any help at all. I peer down the road and suck in a few breaths, trying to keep my hands from shaking, and back up a little farther.
Before I can check the vision again to see if my move changed anything, I see a dark figure running toward me. For a second I’m paralyzed, unsure of whom this could be, because there is no scene like this in the vision. Then my passenger door opens and Trey hops into the truck. “Nice hair,” he says, breathing hard. He slams the door shut.
“What are you doing?” I scream at him. “You have to get out!”
“I can’t let you do this,” he says. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
The vision plays brightly on the windshield like a warning, and suddenly there are five body bags again. “Shit,” I say. “Shit! Trey, get out. You’re going to die if you don’t get out of here!”
He stares at me and puts his seat belt on. My watch says 7:03.
“Fuck, Trey, I’m serious. Get out! The snowplow will be coming from there in one minute,” I scream, pointing, “and you’ll get crushed!” I can’t scream any louder.
“Just calm it down, Demarco!” he yells back, and then he softens. “I can’t let you do this alone. What if you’re one of the people who ends up dead? How would I live with that, huh, Jules? Did you think of that? Just don’t get T-boned.”
I stare at him hard. “Don’t get T-boned,” I whisper. And then I see it in my head—I’m doing it wrong. I need to sideswipe the plow, not let it hit me full-on. I whip the truck into reverse. “You’re brilliant, you stupid jerk.”
“I know,” he says.
I barrel around to the back of the lot and turn my truck to face the restaurant, parallel to the road. I’ll be able to get a moving start alongside the plow, then angle into it where it jumps the curb to steer it back to the street, where it belongs. “Okay,” I say. “Get into the middle seat and strap in, you stubborn fuck. I got this. Shit, damn, hell! It’s 7:04.”
There’s no time to focus on the mirror, and I can’t afford to lose my concentration now. No time to know if this is a winning plan or not, I just have to do it. I suck in a deep breath and grip the wheel tighter, watching for it, rolling forward slightly to get traction.