No! thought Melanie. Keep going! Go to a grocery store, a 7-Eleven, a house. They hadn't passed anything for miles but surely there was something up ahead. Don't stop. Keep going. She'd been thinking those words but her hands must have been moving because Susan responded, "No, we have to. He is hurt."

But the blood, Melanie thought. They shouldn't get his blood on them. There was AIDS, there were other diseases.

These people needed help but they needed official help.

Eight gray birds, sitting in dark…

Susan, eight years younger than Melanie, was the first one out of the school bus, running toward the injured man, her long, black hair dancing around her in the gusting wind.

Then Mrs. Harstrawn.

Melanie hung back, staring. The driver lay like a sawdust doll, one leg bent at a terrible angle. Head floppy, hands fat and pale.

She had never before seen a dead body.

But he isn't dead, of course. No, no, just a cut. It's nothing. He's just fainted.

One by one the little girls turned to gaze at the accident; Kielle and Shannon first, naturally – the Dynamic Duo, the Power Rangers, the X-Men. Then fragile Emily, whose hands were glued together in prayer. (Her parents insisted that she pray every night for her hearing to return. She had told this to Melanie but no one else.) Beverly clutched her chest, an instinctive gesture. She wasn't having an attack just yet.

Melanie climbed out and walked toward the Cadillac. Halfway there she slowed. In contrast to the gray sky, the gray wheat, and the pale highway, the blood was so very red; it was on everything – the man's bald head, his chest, the car door, the yellow leather seat.

The roller coaster of fear sent her heart plummeting toward the ground.

Mrs. Harstrawn was the mother of two teenage boys, a humorless woman, smart, dependable, solid as vulcanized rubber. She reached under her colorful sweater, untucked her blouse and tore off a strip, making an impromptu bandage, which she wrapped around a deep gash in the man's torn head. She bent down and whispered into his ear, pressed on his chest and breathed into his mouth.