The Steel Kiss

Dr. Nathan Evers eased the big sedan through traffic in Brooklyn, Henry Street in the Heights. Not too congested. Good. He stretched, heard a joint pop. The fifty-seven-year-old surgeon was tired. He’d been in operating suites for six hours today. Two gallbladders. One appendectomy. A couple of others. Didn’t need to. But the kid with the scalpel needed some help. Some medicine was about diagnostics and referrals and business. Some was about slicing open the human body.

That young resident wasn’t that sort.

Nathan Evers was.

Exhausted. But more or less content. He felt good, he felt purged. Nobody scrubbed and buffed as much as doctors, surgeons especially. You ended your shift—and it was a shift, just like an assembly-line worker’s—you ended your shift with the hottest of hot showers. The most astringent of soaps. Your body tingling, a humming sound in your ear.

The memory of the bile and blood washed away, he was now in his husband-and-parent frame of mind. Enjoying the pleasant drive through a pleasant part of the city he loved. Soon he’d see his wife and, later tonight, his daughter and his first grandchild. A boy named Jasper.

Hm. Jasper.

Not his first choice when his daughter told him. “Jasper, really? Interesting.”

But then, seeing the wrinkled little blob before him and touching his tiny, tiny fingers and toes and delighting in the perplexed infant grin, he decided any name was wonderful. Balthazar, Federico, Aslan. Sue. It didn’t matter. Heaven was here on earth and he remembered at that moment, eye-to-eye with his grandson, why he had taken the Hippocratic oath. Because life is precious, life is astonishing. Life is worth devoting yours to.

Evers clicked on satellite radio and hit a preselect button, one of the NPR channels, and began listening to Terry Gross’s wonderful show.

“This is Fresh Air… ”

Which was when his car went insane.

Without warning, the engine began to scream, as if he’d floored the accelerator; the cruise control light blinked on spontaneously—his hands hadn’t been anywhere near the switch! — and the system must’ve been instructing the engine to accelerate to a hundred!

“Jesus, no!”

The tachometer redlined and the car surged forward, tires smoking, rear end wobbling like a drag racer’s.

Evers cried out in panic as he wove into the oncoming traffic and, at the moment, empty lane. The vehicle hit fifty, sixty—his head bouncing back against the rest, his eyes unfocused. He slammed his foot on the brake but the engine surge was so unrelenting that the car slowed hardly at all.

“No!” The panic was on him completely. He let up on the brake and jammed down again over and over. He felt a metatarsal in his foot snap. Now at sixty mph and climbing, his auto continued to skid and weave. Cars veered from his path, horns blaring.

He jammed the start/stop button for the engine but the motor kept up its demonic roar.

Think!

The gearshift! Yes! Neutral. He shoved the lever to the central position, and, thank God, that did the trick. The engine still howled but the transmission was disengaged. He pitched forward as the car slowed, dropping to sixty-five, sixty.

Now the brakes.

Which were not working at all.

“No, no, no!” he cried.

Consumed with panic, paralyzed, he could only stare forward as the car raced against a red light and toward the intersection ahead, noting the vehicles stopped or slowly crawling in the cross-traffic lane, perpendicular to him. Cars, a garbage truck, a school bus. He would strike one of them broadside at close to fifty mph.

A splinter of rational thought: You’re dead. But save who you can. Hit the truck, not the bus! Go right, just a bit! But his hands couldn’t pace his mind, and tweaking the wheel sent the car veering directly toward a Toyota sedan. He gaped at the panicked face of the driver of the tiny car he was speeding directly for. The elderly man was as frozen as Nathan Evers.

Another twitch of the wheel and the doctor’s car struck the rear driver’s side of the Japanese vehicle, a few feet behind the man at the wheel.

The next thing that Evers knew he was coming around, after the air bag had knocked him unconscious. He was frozen in position, embraced by bones of steel from the crumpled car. Trapped. But alive, he thought. Jesus, I’m alive.

Outside, people running. Mobile phones were filming the accident. Pricks…  Had at least one person had the decency to call 911?

Then, yes, he heard a siren. Would he end up in his own hospital? That would be rather ironic, maybe the same ER doctor he’d helped out…

But wait. I feel so cold. Why?

Am I paralyzed?

Then Nathan Evers realized that, no, he had complete sensation; what he was feeling was liquid cascading over his body from the mangled rear portion of the Toyota he’d virtually cut in half.

Gasoline was drenching every inch of his body from the waist down.

CHAPTER 45

Amelia Sachs hit eighty on the FDR.