The entire incident took place in less than a heartbeat.
Georges was running toward the blue sedan, which had finally stopped spinning. Its front end was now pointed in the opposite direction of the flow of traffic.
The driver’s side was mashed against the hillside.
Now that the brakes were no longer screeching and the tires no longer squealing, Georges became aware of another noise, one that had been blocked out by the first two. Screams. The woman within the sedan, in the front passenger seat, was screaming.
Just as he reached the passenger side, Georges saw thin orange-and-yellow tongues of fire began to lick the front of the hood.
From what he could tell, there was only one other occupant in the car, the driver. The gray-haired man was slumped over the steering wheel. Georges tried to open the passenger door, but the impact from the careening Mercedes had wedged the door shut.
Desperate, afraid that any second the engine might explode, Georges tried to break the window with his elbow, swinging as hard as he could. The impact reverberated up and down his arm and shot into his chest, but the window remained a solid barrier.
The woman inside the car looked at him, their eyes meeting as shock pressed itself into her young features. Frantically, she tried to open the window on her side, working the buttons on the armrest. It was useless. There was no power fueling the buttons. The window remained in place, sealing in both her and the unconscious driver.
He needed something solid, such as a tire iron, to break the glass, but there wasn’t enough time to run back to his car to get one. Georges knew that the sedan could blow up at any moment.
The Pacific Coast Highway wove its way along the coast with the ocean on one side, a sprawling hillside pockmarked with exceedingly expensive real estate on the other. Searching the ground for something heavy to use, Georges spotted a good-sized rock and quickly picked it up. Hurrying back to the passenger door, he knocked on the window until the woman looked at him again.
“Duck your head,” he shouted at her, lifting the rock.
The woman did as she was told, turning her body so that she was shielding the man in the driver’s seat. Pulling back his arm, Georges threw the rock as hard as he could at the window. The surface of the glass cracked and splintered in half a dozen places. Wrapping his jacket about his right hand, he punched through the shattered glass and cleared away as much as he could.
“C’mon,” he ordered the woman, “You have to get out of there.”
The blonde shook her head emphatically. Her arms were still around the old man. “I can’t leave him,” she cried.
Georges looked from her to the driver. He was old, too old, he judged, to be her husband or even her father. There was blood on the man’s forehead and he seemed to be unconscious, but breathing. Georges couldn’t be sure of the latter.
He was sure that if he spent time arguing with the blonde, they could all suffer the consequences. Leaning in, Georges grabbed the woman by her waist. Surprised, she began to resist.
“First you, then him,” Georges told her firmly. Before she could say anything, he was pulling her through the opening he’d created. He felt the jagged edges scratch at his skin. The blonde weighed next to nothing, even as she struggled against him.
“My grandfather!” she cried as Georges deposited her on the ground.
He examined the other side of the car. It was pressed against the hillside, leaving no room for him. No way could he snake his way in and open the door on that side to get the man out. Without stopping to take into consideration that the car could blow up at any moment, Georges relied on the luck that had seen him through most of his life and crawled in through the window.
The old man’s seat belt was still on. Georges hit the release button and pulled the man over toward his side. Moving as quickly as he could, he angled his body so that they could switch places. He needed the old man next to the opened window.
The blonde realized what he was doing. “Push him through,” she urged. “I can hold him up.”
He had his doubts about that. The blonde didn’t look as if she could hold a twenty-pound sack of grain without stumbling beneath its weight. But he had no other option. Putting his shoulder against the man’s lower torso, Georges pushed the old man’s upper body through the opening.
To his surprise, the woman slipped her arms beneath the old man’s arms and moved backward, pulling the deadweight as he pushed him out. He heard her groan and utter a noise that sounded very much like a battle cry.
The next moment, between the two of them, they’d managed to get the old man out of the vehicle.
The second the unconscious driver was clear of the door, Georges dove out, headfirst, tucking down and into his torso just before he hit the ground so that he rolled. In an instant, he was back up on his feet again. Quickly shoving his shoulder down beneath the old man’s, he wrapped his arm around the man’s waist.
“Run!” he shouted at the blonde.
Instead of dashing before him, the woman mirrored his movements, getting her shoulder beneath the old man’s other shoulder so that both he and the old man could get away from the fiery vehicle faster.
Georges thought he heard the old man mumble, “Leave me,” but he didn’t know if he’d imagined it or not. In any case, he wasn’t about to abandon the man, not after all the trouble he’d just gone through to rescue the driver.
They barely made it back to the front of his sports car before the blue sedan burst into flames.
Georges threw his body over the old man and the blonde just as their car exploded. After several moments had elapsed, he pulled back, suddenly aware of another problem. On his knees, Georges felt the man’s throat and then his chest for a pulse. There was none.
The blonde stared, wide-eyed, barely holding fear at bay. “What is it?”
In response, Georges threaded his hands together over the man’s chest and began to administer CPR. He hardly glanced in her direction, concentrating on only one thing: getting the man’s heart to beat again. “I think he’s had a heart attack.”
“No.” The word escaped her lips like a shell being fired, aimed not at Georges as a denial of his statement but at the old man lying on the ground. “No! Grandpa, do you hear me?” She scrambled closer to the man, moving in on his other side. “No, you can’t do this,” she told him urgently. “You can’t have a heart attack.”
There was absolutely no response from the driver.
“I don’t think he’s listening to you,” Georges told her in between beats.
Mentally, he counted off compressions, then tilted the man’s head back. Pinching his nose, Georges leaned over the man’s mouth to blow his breath into it. Once, twice, a third time, before returning to compressions. The man still wasn’t responding. Georges didn’t allow himself to think about anything except the success of his efforts. Everything else, including the blonde’s voice, became a distant blur.
“In my left coat pocket,” he told her as he resumed compressions for a third time, “I’ve got a cell phone.” The moment he said it, she galvanized into action, reaching her long, slender fingers into his pocket. He could feel them as they slid in.
As he fought death for possession of the old man’s life, it struck him that this was one hell of a way to meet a woman. Because even in the midst of the ongoing turmoil, as he struggled to bring the driver back around, it did not escape Georges that she was one of the most attractive women he had ever seen.
“Got it!” she declared breathlessly, pulling the cell phone out of his pocket. Rocking back on her knees, she began to press the three numbers that popped into everyone’s mind during an emergency.
Nine-one-one would generate an appearance of an ambulance driven by EMTs.