d away from them like a
stone falling toward the ground and Cade almost lost the dinner he'd spent all
that time consuming when Mandi followed her in the same manner. Looking down, he
saw where Andrea was going.
A tanker truck had maneuvered to refill a local gas station's underground
tanks and a yellow pickup truck in the alley behind the station was heading
straight for the truck at about fifty miles per hour. As they neared the ground,
they could see the driver slumped on the steering wheel.
As Andrea flew to deal with the pickup, Mandi landed to set Cade down and
flew to join Andrea. Everything seemed well in hand, but an unanticipated wild
card in the form of a blue Ford sedan entered the parking lot behind the tanker
truck.
The driver couldn't take his eyes off the two flying women and didn't have
sense enough to stop the car. The Ford hit a light pole and one of the wires
above snapped with a sound like a rifle shot, then swung down and touched the
concrete, where the current made it dance crazily around the car.
When Cade saw the woman on the passenger side open her door, he ran toward
the car yelling for her to stay inside it. She stared at him dazedly for a
moment, noticed that the man beside her was bleeding, unconscious, and slumped
between the steering wheel and the driver's door, and freaked out.
The power line was slapping itself frantically around the car as the woman
screamed, opened the door wider, and got out of the car, but she couldn't run.
Her gashed and bloody left leg gave out and she tried to crawl, but chances were
just too good that the power line would hit her.
Cade saw a stave from a broken pallet and grabbed it on the way to the car.
It was one of the spine boards; hard wood with half a dozen slats still stuck to
it.
He almost dove over the front of the car and managed to bat the power line
aside from the woman twice as she continued crawling, unaware that he was there.
Then the power line slapped the side of the car and rebounded so quickly
that Cade had no chance to swing at it. He could only brace the stave crossways
in front of the oncoming power line and hope things would go well.
The heavy line smashed through the wooden stave and hit Cade's chest like a
baseball bat, knocking him flat and slapping him twice more across the chest and
legs.
With each smashing slap, the line sent massive amounts of electricity
through Cade