Petrified

Monday, 5:27 p.m.
By the time he reached the intersection with the Vine Street Expressway, Braydon Harris was convinced that God had it in for him.

An electric storm like Judgment Day was flashing and thundering over the center of Philadelphia, and rain was hammering down so hard that it was almost impossible for him to see the highway ahead of him through the spray.

On the back seat of his seven-year-old Dodge Caliber, Sukie was lying fast asleep, snuggled up under a red plaid blanket, clutching that moon-faced doll of hers. Sukie had been overjoyed that Braydon had kidnapped her from Melinda’s parents, but this evening it seemed as if the Lord was on the side of Melinda and the Maryland Family Courts, and that He wasn’t going to allow Braydon to make an easy getaway.

As he drove north on the Schuylkill Expressway, past the Philadelphia Zoo, there was a bellow of thunder directly overhead, so loud that Braydon was almost deafened. Sukie woke up and screamed in fright, dropping her doll on the floor.

‘Daddy! I’m scared! What is it? I dropped Binkie! I dropped Binkie!’

‘It’s OK, sweetheart! Everything’s OK! It’s only thunder! It can’t hurt you!’

‘I’m scared, Daddy! I dropped Binkie! I can’t find her!’

There was another devastating cannonade of thunder, and this time Sukie let out a high-pitched shriek, the kind of shriek that only terrified little girls can produce, almost beyond the range of human hearing. The rain began to drum down even harder on the Caliber’s roof, as if God were doing His level best to flatten it.

‘I can’t find Binkie! I’ve lost her! I can’t find Binkie!’

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, it’s a rainstorm, that’s all! There’s nothing to be scared of!’

‘But Binkie’s scared!’

Braydon twisted himself around in the driver’s seat and reached behind him with his right hand, trying to locate Sukie’s doll on the floor. At first he couldn’t feel it at all, but then he arched his back and lifted himself up in his seat a little more, and his fingertips touched the doll’s frizzy nylon hair.

‘It’s OK,’ he told Sukie. ‘I got her!’

He managed to pinch Binkie’s hair between his index finger and his middle finger, and he was just about to pick her up when his windshield was flooded with blinding white light. Through his furiously-flapping windshield wipers he saw a huge truck sliding sideways across the expressway in front of him, and the single word DIAMOND.

Even with both hands on the wheel, he probably couldn’t have steered the Caliber out of the path of the jackknifing semi. As it was, his right arm was pinioned between the two front seats, and he had to spin the wheel with his left hand only.

He heard nothing. He didn’t even hear Sukie shrieking. The Caliber skidded through one hundred eighty degrees and slid backward under