Diane Davidson - Chopping Spree

“Julian!” I screamed. “Look out!”

Julian reared back and dropped his load. He sprang away from the path of the vehicle, lost his balance, and splashed face forward into the muddy water. The truck charged past him. I watched in horror until Julian’s mud-drenched head, followed by his body, emerged from the water. I looked for Barry. He had stopped running and seemed frozen, watching Julian slosh through the puddle.

The truck was barreling toward us. Julian, sopping wet and shouting, was running raggedly along behind it.

I dropped my box, raced toward Barry, and grabbed his shirt. As I yanked him fiercely sideways, the huge, noisy truck swerved toward us.

“Barry, run with me, dammit!” I hollered. My old friend looked at me, his face stricken. He tried to hurry, but tangled his feet and stumbled to his knees.

The truck was thirty feet away and closing. With all my strength, I wrenched Barry’s arm and body upward. His legs moved spastically as I pulled him over row after row of ruts. Finally, I tripped on one of the hard ridges and we were both airborne. We hit the dirt hard.

A foot down in a wide ditch, I could hear but not see the bellowing truck. It, too, seemed to be plowing up and down the ridges. I tugged on Barry, who was groaning as he tried to scoot along beside me. Hopefully, we were also headed away from the path the truck had been taking… a path straight at us. If I could not see the truck driver, I reasoned, then hopefully, he could not see Barry or me. The way it had been bearing down on us, I did not think that enormous dump truck was just a runaway vehicle.

The truck noise rose to deafening proportions. When our ditch narrowed, Barry and I stopped crawling. I eased up to have a peek. Fifteen feet from us, exactly where we had been when we hit the dirt, the truck vaulted the ditch where we now lay panting. All I could see of the driver was the shadowy reflection of a face behind a mud-splattered window.

Panting, Barry and I rose up on our elbows. I didn’t think the truck driver had actually seen us. Once past the ruts, the truck picked up speed. It crashed through the construction fence with a fearsome clanking of metal. Then it hurtled across Doughnut Drive. With a deafening boom, it slammed into the embankment. The berm exploded. Dirt erupted over the truck. Clouds of dust mushroomed upward as an avalanche of soil poured onto the road. A person wearing a baseball cap and baggy overalls jumped out of the cab, clambered clumsily over the embankment, then disappeared.

What was that about?

Beside me, Barry gasped and cursed. “I knew this would happen!” He was covered with mud. “I just knew it!”

CHAPTER 3

I coughed, spit out grit, and coughed again. Then I inhaled dust, coughed, and inhaled some more. I had the keen sense of having lost moments, maybe even hours—as if there’d been a period of blackness of indeterminate length. Maybe I had passed out.

I eased back onto the dirt and tried to clear the mental fog. My body lay crumpled between two dirt ridges. A severe aching sensation swept from my shoulders to my legs, slowly at first, then with more depth and speed. I groaned and elbowed up again to a half-sitting position. I gazed vacantly at the nearly lethal path the truck had taken. What had that been about? I had no idea.

Doing my best to ignore the pain, I took stock of myself. Not only were my legs, arms, and face filthy, my caterer’s outfit was streaked beyond recognition. The remains of several shrimp rolls clung to my jacket. Looking around, I realized that the truck had squashed my box and sent the contents flying.

How much food had been lost? Would we be able to do the event?

Why had Barry yelled I knew it ?

I brushed off my formerly white, formerly crisp caterer’s jacket. Shimmering dust rose from the jacket as food strands showered the dirt. I sneezed violently.

Two yards away, Barry rubbed his face and hacked for breath. He had landed in a deep puddle, and his once-khaki pants were now the color of café au lait. His formerly green shirt clung to his torso like a mossy towel. Julian, his wet clothes stuck to his body, trotted toward us. He was shouting again, this time at the construction crew, something along the lines of getting their asses up here so they could help us.

Barry looked at me and blinked, then blinked again. He slid sideways in the puddle and reached in my direction.

“Goldy! Did you see the driver?”

“No. Whoever it was ran away.” I didn’t state the obvious: that whoever the driver was, he’d seemed intent on mowing us down.

“Do you know who it was?” I tried but didn’t succeed in keeping the accusatory tone from my voice.

Barry shook his head and turned away from me. Why was his muttered “No” so unconvincing?

I studied the dump truck wedged in the embankment. Along Doughnut Drive, lines of cars had stopped. Honking and yelling rose above the throngs of curious drivers who’d left their vehicles and were hustling rapidly along the road. Why else? They were trying to get a better look at the accident.

We needed state patrol and the sheriff’s department, I decided, and quick. With any luck, one of those drivers was using a cell phone to call for help right now.

And speaking of cell phones… I usually kept mine in my apron pocket. But I hadn’t yet put on my apron, so I didn’t have it. I sighed.

I was having a great day.

Barry was staring at the errant truck. There was blood on his forehead. Julian’s words were finally discernible: Are you all right? I yelled back that we were fine. How are you doing? I wanted to know. Julian hollered that he was fine, then raced down to the construction area and called to more workers. Oh, to be young and able to run around in wet clothes.

I hauled myself to my feet, then offered a hand to Barry, still stuck in the puddle. He groaned and splattered mud as he righted himself. His hands were icy, his face pale. Once free of the ditch water, he shivered, grasped the back of his left thigh, and cried out in pain.

Victor Wilson, still wearing his orange hat, raced up the parking lot. Five workers jogged along behind him. The crew did not appear to be paying much attention to Victor’s bellowed orders, commands that were liberally sprinkled with curses. With his red ponytail flapping, Victor swerved away from Barry and me and toward the truck, but not before I’d squinted at the boldly printed words on his sweatshirt. We Got Dirt. No kidding, I thought. Lots and lots of dirt.

Barry hobbled up beside me and we both spoke at once. What happened, Who could have done such a thing, Are you badly hurt, Do you have a cell phone? Without waiting for my reply, Barry wiped the trickle of blood from his scraped forehead and gazed at Victor, who was now climbing into the truck.

“No, no!” I yelled. “You shouldn’t be doing that!” Ten minutes ago, the crazed driver of that vehicle had tried to kill us. Or at least it sure had seemed that way. Nobody should be touching anything until the cops arrived.

Disregarding my protest, Victor tried to start the truck anyway. The engine groaned, clicked, and refused to turn over. With another cascade of curses, he finally got the engine going. The behemoth truck revved and erupted into an insistent beep beep beep as it growled back from the embankment and swerved to miss the mountains of displaced berm dirt. The gaggle of spectators standing on Doughnut Drive moved aside en masse.

Julian, still sopping, sprinted over to us. He assessed me, then Barry, and asked if we needed to go to the hospital. We both said no. Just call the cops, I told him. Julian replied that he was calling the cops and an ambulance to have us looked at.