Free Dark Places of the Soul: Dark Soul Trilogy - Book 1 by Paul Donaldson Page A

of his haggard appearance in the
cracked side view mirror and paused to inspect a bruise on the left
side of his forehead. During the roll he must have hit his head
against the window on the driver’s side. Keeping his grip on
consciousness had been a fortunate outcome of the disaster.
    He stood, surveying the damage on the
northbound lane of the highway. The small truck, which seemed to
have caused the whole bout with tragedy, was parked a few hundred
feet further down the highway. The large gray car Noah had been in
the process of passing, at the worse possible time, set in the
breakdown lane, parallel to his position on the median divider.
There was obvious damage to the gray car’s front fender. A woman in
hysterics came out to the road from the passenger’s side of the
vehicle. He’d seen her in the passenger seat when passing, an
attractive woman in the company of an older man. In Noah’s mind he
began to seek reasons why she couldn’t possibly be the driver’s
daughter.
    Two other vehicles had remained on the
roadway after colliding. The tangled mass of metal smoked and would
be heroes where desperately trying to free those trapped behind
twisted steel.
    “ He’s dead.”
    Noah heard the shout from the highway. The
woman slammed the top of the gray sedan with an angry fist. He
moved around the rear of his wreckage, amazed that he didn’t feel
any pain in his body. The woman looked at him and again repeated
her chorus.
    “ He’s dead… damn
him.”
    An unfeeling eulogy by a poor actress, she
disgusted the part of him which was still clinging to his role as a
man of God.
    Excited shouts from the two vehicles to his
south took hold of his attention, stealing his interest from the
woman who cursed the dead. Three people, one limping badly ran from
the wreckage of their vehicles. A spark, a flame, and for an
instant Noah saw the faces of the heroes along with the face of the
victim saved. The brief moment evaporated when the flame kindled a
world-deafening explosion.
     
    ***
     
    “ Shit, that doesn’t look
good,” Keri’s reaction came in response to the flaming wreckage
ahead.
    James applied the breaks to the lumbering
Winnebago. The war zone viewed through the windshield captured the
attention of all northbound traffic. Passage ahead was blocked by
two late model cars engulfed in flames. James brought the camper to
rest on the wide gravel shoulder of the highway. Keri opened the
door on her side of the vehicle and beat him to the ground before
the idling engine ceased. She ran on ahead, like an emergency
worker at the scene of her expertise. James followed.
    Amid the chaos three actors in a script gone
off course sat a safe distance from the blaze. One of the three was
a woman in her forties, a cut across the right side of her
forehead. The other two were teenaged boys. They both seemed to be
uninjured and more than willing to help the woman out.
    Further down the highway Keri saw two men
walking back up the black top from a pick-up truck which had pulled
over. On the median a car rested upside down, its driver was
presently on a course across the highway to a car where a
distraught woman waited.
    James moved ahead of her as a proclamation
of someone being deceased carried through the still morning air.
She recognized the man crossing the interstate from the median as
Noah Cote, the minister from the restaurant who had been given
another opportunity to amend his life.
    “ Didn’t think we’d run
into him again… this soon,” she said to James.
    “ He is responding to the
woman at the gray sedan ahead,” he commented. “Someone is either
injured… severely, or dead.”
    Keri knelt down to the woman being attended
to by the teenaged boys. She estimated that one of the teenagers
was old enough to have recently got his license. This was a hell of
a way to be introduced to the realities of the highway.
    “ You okay?” She
asked.
    The woman nodded her head in response. One
of the boys wore a